The Dark Arts Journal THE GOTHIC AND ITS FORMS

Volume 2 Issue 1 | darkartsjournal.wordpress.com | Spring 2016 P a g e | 2

The Dark Arts Journal: Vol 2.1

ISSN 2397-107X

Contents

Cover Art: Doorway of No Return 1 Morticia

Editor’s Introduction 3 Richard Gough Thomas

Giselle, ou les Wilis: Gothic possibilities in the ballet blanc 4 Jana Baró González

‘Mute and beautiful, she played with dolls … mute and beautiful 27 she killed’: Anne Rice’s Vampire Child Donna Mitchell

Occupational Hazards: Nihilism and Negation in Thomas Ligotti’s 43 ‘Corporate Horror’ Rachid M’Rabty

Under the Weather: Being (Un) Well in a Gothic World 68 Carey Millsap-Spears

Contributors 88

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Editor’s Introduction

Richard Gough Thomas

The Gothic is at once a mode, a genre, and a culture. The Gothic is elusive and protean. We thought to embrace that, asking the scholarly community for articles that considered “the Gothic in all its forms” and received a wide variety of responses. From a great many submissions, however, a theme became evident: the human form, and its place within the Gothic. Humanity provides, if nothing else, a frame of reference that we all understand – a nominal idea of the self that the Gothic can question or undermine.

Jana Baró González opens the volume by describing the uncanny representation of the dancer in the ballet Giselle. Donna Mitchell discusses an iconic figure in Gothic popular culture: the predator trapped in a child’s body in vampire fiction. Rachid M’Rabty confronts humanity’s irrelevance in the unrestrained capitalism of Thomas Ligotti’s short fiction. Finally, Carey Millsap-Spears explores the Gothic aspects of ‘wellness’ culture, suggesting that we might read something monstrous into an obsession with ‘good health’.

Producing Dark Arts requires many ‘Gothic bodies’. This volume would have been impossible without our editorial team, and the time volunteered by our peer reviewers, all of whom I would like to thank from the bottom of my dark heart.

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Giselle, ou les Wilis: Gothic possibilities in the ballet blanc

Jana Baró González

Giselle, ou les Wilis tells the story of the delicate German peasant Giselle, who dies in shock after discovering she will never be able to marry the man she loves since he is actually a duke. Two versions of the libretto exist: in the first, she dies of heartbreak – added to a literal heart condition –, in a ‘folie douce’, since ‘chez les femmes, la raison est dans le coeur; coeur blesse, tête malade’, while in the second her pain pushes her to commit suicide by stabbing herself with a sword.1 The two versions have been staged, but it is the first one that has remained more popular. In the second act Giselle’s ghost joins the wilis, a host of avenging spirits of women who died just before their weddings who now haunt and kill men; there are few images as iconic in ballet as that of Myrtha, their queen, arriving at Giselle’s grave rosemary wand in hand to summon her from the dead. However, when they trap her duke she forgives his lies and intervenes to save his life, an act of compassion that frees her soul.

It is in this remarkably different second act, the ballet blanc – named after the colour scheme of the costumes – in which the audience finds ‘theatrically replicated the fantastic rupture of the apparent, ordinary surface of reality’.2 The second act of Giselle is indeed drenched in Gothic aesthetics, from the eerie, gliding movements

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of the ghostly wilis to the setting, a moonlit forest – a liminal, dangerous space where a lost traveller might see the dead dance. The trembling lights transform the tulle- bound corps de ballet into spectral figures as the story leaps into the fantastic, with the frenzied thirst for vengeance, sacrifice for the sake of true love and redemption as its central themes.

Because of the genre’s high formality, it has been said that ‘ballet as an art form is, in fact, a superb site for observing Western rules for gendered and sexed behaviour’.3 Even if Giselle is not performed as it was in its premiere – it is Marius Petipa’s 1884 revision the one that survives on our stages – the story has not been altered much, and the movement, set and costume designs, and characters respond to 1840s conventions. In his much-discussed critique of Giselle, Evan Alderson wrote that ballet, especially if taken at face value, can reinforce ‘regressive cultural stereotypes’, as ‘it propagates socially charged imagery as a form of the beautiful’ quite overtly.4 Nonetheless, Mark Franko argued that it can be a site of resistance:

Dance has served to fashion and project images of monarchy, national identity, gendered identity, racialized identity, and ritualized identity (…) Dance can absorb and retain the effects of political power as well as resist the very effects it appears to incorporate within the same gesture. This is what makes dance a potent political form of expression: it can encode norms as well as deviation from the norms in structures of parody, irony, and pastiche that appear and disappear quickly, often leaving no trace.5

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If the Gothic has been read as ‘a form that serves as a barometer of socio-cultural anxieties in its exploration of the dark side of individuals, cultures, and nations – to interrogate socially dictated and institutionally entrenched attitudes and laws relating to gender roles, identities and relations’,6 then the Gothic within dance has a double potential to be a site of questioning. In a sense, Giselle, with all its Gothic content, has come to embody passion for ballet itself. Many ballets have intradiegetic dancing scenes; folk dances or royal balls are a common feature, but in Giselle the very act of dancing has a key role. The protagonist, after all, is characterised by her love for dancing, and so are the wilis. Even if dancing is read as a metaphor for sex or a wilder, unconventional heart, it is clear that the maddening, unsettling force of dancing is at the centre of the text. Thus, I mean to explore how Giselle used the Gothic to represent the limited position of women in contemporary French society and, perhaps, even offer alternatives.

First shown in Paris in 1841, Giselle enthralled both audiences and critics; it codified the genre of the ballet blanc and underlined the stellar status of the many ballerinas who have danced the principal part. In its first staging, the lead parts were danced by Carlotta Grisi (Giselle), Lucien Petipa (Albrecht, the Duke) and Adèle Dumilâtre (Myrtha). The choreography was created by Jean Coralli (who also danced the part of Hilarion, Giselle’s other suitor) and Jules Perrot. The libretto was written by Jules- Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and the famous Romantic poet and critic Théophile Gautier – who was in turn inspired by Victor Hugo’s 1829 poem “Fantômes” and Henrich Heine’s 1835 De l’Allemagne. Gautier was known to lament ‘the gap between (…) the word and the body’:7 this lack of explicit textuality, which complicated the

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reception of the performed narrative and opened it to different interpretations, was supposed to be eased by the music: composers such as Giselle’s Adolphe Adam attempted to mimic spoken language through melody and rhythm.8 Almost a century later, Ninette de Valois confirmed its place as a classic in the United Kingdom when she asked Nicholas Sergeyev to produce it for the Vic-Wells company in the 1930s.9 As such, it has been staged to exhaustion: it has been mocked as something stereotypical and démodé in the series Flesh and Bone (Starz 2015- ongoing) and appropriated and retold from different perspectives. In Mats Ek’s 1982 revision, the wilis were substituted for nurses in a mental hospital. The Dance Theater of Harlem 1984 production, in which the story was set in a 19th century Louisiana plantation, brought new readings to the Eurocentric implications of the discipline. Its popularity has not decreased: it is part of the 2016 program for the Royal Ballet in London, and clips from rehearsals have been shared through its social network profiles, both to promote the show and to provide insight into the workings of the company for fans.

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Fig. 1 Carlotta Grisi dans le röle de Giselle.10

The love affair between the Gothic and ballet is not confined to revisions of Romantic ballets. Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 horror film Black Swan set his story of ambition, madness and doubling in an elite ballet company – to all appearances a claustrophobic place of constant self-surveillance, barbed relationships and discipline. Furthermore, contemporary ballet productions still draw from the Gothic: they often adapt classic Gothic texts – as the Northern Ballet did with Wuthering Heights (2002) or Dracula (2005) – or create new ones. The Royal Ballet staged Raven Girl, a dark fairy tale written by Audrey Niffenegger and choreographed by Wayne McGregor in 2013; it tells the story of a wingless, black-

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corseted bird-girl who struggles to gain a pair of wings. There is something of the Gothic to be found in Matthew Bourne’s popular revision of Swan Lake (1995) and in his adaptation of Edward Scissorhands (2005), but the choreographer’s love for the genre is made explicit in his Sleeping Beauty (2012), literally subtitled A Gothic Romance. In this version, the fairies have grown suspicious fangs and their eyeshadow does not quite stay in its proper place: they are vampires. This brief overview shows that Gothic portrayals of liminal states and the (un)dead are not limited to Romantic ballet; Joellen Meglin’s words about ‘the unnatural, surpassing technique’, ‘the reincarnation of the past embodied in its traditions’, ‘the body’s apparent imprint with the genotype of the ancestors’, ‘the implicit danger and the proximity of death vis-à-vis the body’s inert and vulnerable frame’ and ‘the metaphor of life (and life after death) in the body’s ability to move’11 can be applied to ballet in general. Thus, the Gothic has persisted in the repertoire of contemporary ballet companies, as has Giselle itself.

While ballet as a discipline was centuries old when Giselle was first staged, its conventions as we know them are fairly recent. Narrative ballet (d’action), in which mime is used along dance to tell a story, was developed in the 18th Century. As technical complexity grew, so did the distance between performer – an increasingly professionalised role – and observer.12 By the early 19th Century, ballet was a popular activity attended by ‘a cross-section of Parisians (…) including members of the government who often cut short their political discussions in order not to miss the ballet’.13 The Paris Opera was at the time the undisputed centre of ballet in the Western world, and Giselle drew the nation’s attention from the beginning with a

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strong presence in the press. Like opera, it required certain ‘skills to decipher the codes at play in the plots’ staging’14 since plots often had complicated twists. The period between the late 1820s and the 1850s marked the height of Romantic ballet, which ‘in allying itself with popular fiction (…) drew upon the fantastic, the exotic and the gothic’.15 Then, as now, ballets were often adapted from novels, plays or tales; there was a preference for melodrama and stories of birth-right and social order restored. Exotic settings were used to question French values, often by showing far-off lands where women governed and men strayed only to come back and be forgiven. There was, then, continuity between ballet and literature; I am not referring merely to symbiosis, but to all genres as being articulated from the same aesthetic and artistic movements. Joellen A. Meglin’s three-part analysis ‘Behind the Veil of Translucence: An Intertextual Reading of the Ballet Fantastique in France, 1831-1841’ is particularly interesting from this perspective: she proposes the genre of the ballet fantastique as this art’s reflection of the conte fantastique of French Romanticism, which she also aligns with the Gothic.16 She offers a feminist reading of the texts, finding that; ‘Women are raped, dismembered, clubbed, or set afire; they are brutally punished and they suffer horribly. They also die one after another, through diseases that make them lovelier and more desirable than ever’.17 The ballet blanc, she says, sprang from a ‘monstrous underlying (…) bizarre bedrock’,18 linked to the contes bruns of frenzy, ‘retribution and brutality’.19

The heroine’s suffering and tragic death is not the only Gothic convention in which Giselle participates. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers an overview, noting that while the

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structures of Gothic texts are narrow, there is a wide range of tone and focus to be found. Among the conventions she lists, Giselle includes “wild landscapes”, “feudal societies”, “trembling sensibility of the heroine and the impetuosity of her lover”, a – quite literal – preoccupation for “sleeplike and deathlike states”, “burial”, “unnatural echoes or silences”, “the poisonous effects of guilt and shame”, “nocturnal landscapes and dreams” and “apparitions from the past”.20 While it might seem unnecessary to note each element as in a checklist, it is useful to point out the extent to which Giselle is embedded in the Gothic mode. Furthermore, the Gothic is indeed characterised by the depictions of extreme states of mind. Coral Ann Howells, drawing from Foucault, states that ‘by the 1790s sensibility seems to have become a nervous disease’; Gothic heroines show an ‘extraordinarily heightened sense of the inter-relatedness between physical and emotional responses’.21 The famous “mad scene” in which Giselle discovers the true identity of the duke and dances wildly, hair unbound, until she drops dead – leading to the end of the first act – takes this physical expression of emotion to the extreme.

Their characters might die, but the (women) performers themselves were almost regarded as deities: the Romantic period signalled the rise of the ballerina from performer to cultural icon. Marketing devices such as posters or press releases were developed, including gossip columns, dress-up dolls, and volumes which included portraits of dancers or actresses.22 Parodies – that is, imitations of the text that could be satirical or not – of Giselle were published and performed throughout the 1840s, which testifies to the popularity of the piece.23 The dancers began to be seen as commodities, and their image had market value. In his ballet criticism, Gautier

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appreciated ‘the much-praised abstract quality of romantic ballet, epitomised in the ballet blanc: lightness, evasiveness, transparency and purity, titillatingly embodied by sensual dancers.’24 Gautier’s passion for Carlotte Grisi could be considered anecdotic, but it reflects the critics’ tendency to speak of their objects in adoring, even possessive terms. The presumption of a male, heterosexual gaze was strong enough to deem male dancers irrelevant; ‘after all, Gautier declared that “the true husband of an actress… is the public”.’25 Their writing focused on the eroticism of the dance; on top of that, male critics also spoke over the women in the audience, of whom they said that; ‘women of all epochs have loved the vaporous, the fantastic, the ideal, the extraordinary and everything that is of the essence of a coded world that is found only in novels’ –26 it seems questionable that any women were asked about it. In 1840, Jules Janin took a similar tone when saying about Marie Taglioni that ‘if we had known that our creation would one fine day go up in smoke, that she would abandon us, we would not have done so much for her.’27 In her seminal essay on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Mulvey describes the fragmentation of the female body by the camera –28 ballet critics often described the ballerinas’ bodies in such terms: ‘A pretty face, a charming neck, flawless white hands, a very fine leg, a bosom that thrills, an eye that shines, a warm pink mouth, and a white dress that floats in the breeze.’29 Gautier, meanwhile, was content with stating that a ballerina ‘has no excuse for not being beautiful and she can be reproached for her plainness.’30 Onstage, then, ballerinas were ‘the object of the gaze (…) the female corporeal

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display created a voyeuristic sexualised and racialized image’.31 That is not to say that the women in the audience were completely glossed over, but male critics did attempt to talk for them. Alderson writes that ‘Gautier called [Marie] Taglioni “the dancer for Women” in order to contrast her style with Fanny Elsser’s more sensuous appeal to men’.32 This implies that this dancer for Women – again, a unified concept with no room for difference – is imagined with a beauty and purity that; ‘depend upon a sexuality refined to the vanishing point (…) She is also a dancer for men – men whose attraction to this attenuation of the flesh both sentimentalizes sexual possession and spares them full acknowledgement of a sexuality they cannot control’.33

Consequently, the ballerina was – no matter what Gautier might say – for male consumption – although there is space for research on her reception among the women in the audience, and their potential pleasure in looking must not be glossed over. Of course, talking about “the ballerina” in the singular is bound to limit our understanding of the many women who danced. Offstage, ballerinas often lived in financial hardship, which endangered their ownership of their own bodies: they often resorted to prostitution, and access to the Foyer de la Danse was auctioned to men of means by the director of the Opera. Nonetheless, their very existence could allow women ‘to envisage dancing as a career choice, and to perform in a repertoire of narrative ballets that address questions about sexual and gender identity, and socio-political configurations’.34 Even if they succeeded and became stars, however, they were only respected as mediums of male genius, and their use of their bodies marked them as ‘very far away from bourgeois decency and acceptance’.35 To sum

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up, they were often reduced to their perceived sexuality – do they or don’t they – both in their professional and personal lives. Even if the image of ballet was becoming more feminised, men still held most creative positions, which allowed male dancers to have longer careers. Nonetheless, there is much research to be done about the participation of women in the backstage, and it is difficult to know to what extent each performer adapted the choreography to their taste: Did they tweak their mime to give psychological depth to the characters? Did their preferences influence their movements, or did they adhere completely to the official choreography?

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Fig. 2 Giselle, paysanne.36 Fig. 3 Giselle.37

It is the material aspect of Romantic ballet – of bodies and costume – what was more strongly codified by Giselle, rather than its music or its narrative elements, which answer to previous artistic traditions. Marina Nordera proposes a ‘dialectical game (…) between the autonomy of the dancing body and the text, in which the body, itself in process of becoming text, assumes its own political significance’.38 That is, moving bodies can be read in tension or opposition to the story they are supposed to tell, and therefore they have political significance. The ballerinas’ bodies perform a story and a character theatrically. It seems useful to draw from Judith Butler’s concept of performance, as she clarifies herself:

Performance as bounded ‘act’ is distinguished from performativity insofar as the latter consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice’; further, what is ‘performed’ works to conceal, if not to disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious.39

Gender, according to Butler, is performative, but not a performance. It is a mimetic effect; individuals – subjects who do not precede their gendering – act in imitation

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of an ideal and in their repetition, they create the ‘effect of gender uniformity’.40 That is, femininity and masculinity are constructed as they are performed. A theatrical performance, on the other hand, does imply agency from the performer; gender norms can be hyperbolized or satirised, and it can point to spaces for subversion by showing failures and gaps in gender norms. It is not the objective of this paper to examine gender roles in ballets – in their formal, unchanging patterns and rigid costumes – as a hyperbolic performance with subversive potential; it would lead us away from the Gothic and into pure theory. Nonetheless, there is certainly space for such an analysis.

Technique was increasingly gendered, as signalled by the use of the pointe shoe. Judith Chazin-Bennahum considers these shoes a fetish in her study of the ballet costume.41 They often play significant parts in fantasy texts, as Hilary Davidson – who also refers to them as fetishes – points out: ‘The most magical fictional shoes are those that lift their wearers highest above the earth (…) As well as being physical, the elevation can be social or spiritual – above the quotidian’.42 While pointe shoes were not magical within the narration, they were tools to transmit precisely that impression of superhuman elevation. Moreover, ‘certain footwear also has potent erotic connotations (…) Echoes of frenzy and demonic possession merge here with ideas about controlling women’s pleasure in their own physicality’.43 In the context of the article, this refers to 20th century texts such as the film The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948), but the pointe shoe was a recent development when Giselle premiered, and it was indeed associated with the spectres, temptresses, and titillating-yet-chaste heroines of Romantic ballet. Reading them as objects of

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fantasy or the Gothic, then, perhaps is not so far-fetched. Romantic ballet also brought a specific costume, the white tutu, which had not been worn before by any social group at any point in history; since it did not belong to any community but rather was only worn by women on stage, regardless of the origin of their characters, it was purely a gender marker. This aesthetic was, again, strongly related to a wider contemporary taste for the Gothic, playing up everything otherworldly and mysterious. Lit by gaslight (fire hazard and all), the dancers’ figures seemed to become translucent; they ‘would be dressed in the same white skirts, they would look alike, they would move alike, supernatural beings, neither alive nor dead. The world they evoked lay beyond life’.44 In Western tradition, white symbolises innocence – but the creatures wearing white on stage could be perverse, turning it into an ambiguous sign, both of purity and of the illusion of it. Nonetheless, this specific reading of the costumes of ballet blanc has been lost; Juhasz says about the swans in Swan Lake (first staged in 1877) that ‘the dominant impression they create is that of ballerinas’.45

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Fig. 4 Giselle, The Royal Ballet.46

In Giselle, the otherworldly figures in white are the wilis, ghostly women from Slavic folklore. While ghosts are found in fiction before the Gothic, they are central figures of the genre. They usually sought vengeance, guarded treasures or, more importantly, taught moral lessons.47 Often a ghost would appear ‘to rectify an emotional imbalance in the life of the other caused in greater or lesser part by the dislocation of death’.48 Nonetheless, the wilis’ emotional imbalance and unnatural dislocation are their own; they are the wandering spectres of women who prey on lost men, forcing them to dance to their death; they can also be linked to vampires. Sedgwick writes that;

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In the Gothic, if desire animates characters, it is repetition and death itself that most stamp them as (with) characters and fix them in those identifying ocular confrontations where, as face reflects character from face, pallor and immobility are epidemic. The only passion that lasts until death is revenge, the passion most nearly stripped of affective coloration, the one that comes closest to embodying the unadulterated compulsion to repeat.49

This passage, taken out of context, could perfectly apply to the wilis. As spectres, they belong to the ranks of ethereal ballet characters whose vertical movements show off the dancer’s lightness, grace and apparent fragility. In an interesting collapse of dichotomies, they use only their bodies to represent the soul; or perhaps, less subversively, they represent the feminine mystique with a ‘chaste, “Christian” image’ that dominates the stage ‘by the premonition of her absence’.50

Moreover, the wilis wear brides’ veils – doubling as shrouds – in their entrance scene, which only adds to their mystery and to the tension between apparent chastity and simmering eroticism beneath, as critics of the time liked to point out. After all, they delighted in the victimization of virtuous women and their transformation – or revelation – into femmes fatales. Sedgwick, in her study of Gothic conventions, also discusses the veil. By lying against the skin, the veil takes on elements of flesh and contagion; moreover, ‘the veil that conceals and inhibits sexuality comes by the same gesture to represent it’.51 The veil, as a surface element, can be inscribed on – linguistically or not – it signals the wilis’ identity but it also as hides and homogenizes it. Also according to Sedgwick, in the Gothic view ‘individual identity (…) is social and relational rather than original or private’.52 In any case, while the

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veil is a key aspect in the visual coding of the wilis, it is soon thrown off – as a sign of liberation, of a break from this repressive surface to a more irrational depth, or perhaps simply to allow the dancers to move with more ease.

The wilis are an exclusively female community who inhabit liminal spaces both metaphorically – they are neither dead nor alive – and literally. It was not uncommon in Romantic ballets to portray an ‘Other’ society in which women have power: there are witch and sylph communities in La Sylphide (1832), for instance, and harem women take power in La Révolte des Femmes (183). In Giselle, the leader of the wilis, Myrtha, is called a queen and acts like a military officer, with commanding gestures, high, precise jumps, and an assertive attitude. The wilis deliberately resemble battalions, although their ‘frighteningly martial image’ is softened by the costumes.53 Indeed, there is something threateningly masculine about these ghosts; their dance is referred to as ‘the fatal Wili waltz’.54 The hero, then, is not only lost in the forest, but also trapped in a place where gender norms are subverted. The wilis’ society could be read as a space of liberation and potential empowerment, since it is only as a ghost that Giselle is free from the heart condition that limited and eventually killed her, able to communicate with her lover, and moved by determination, not madness. This new-found freedom is materialised by the choreography, which is not earth-bound but en l’air, constantly jumping and diving. The ballerina playing her, then, must perform a ‘tragic transformation from disobedient, self-centered dancing villager (…) into generous, self-sacrificing, yet still insubordinate wili’,55 that is, it is only in death that her character develops. This split between sensual yet mad Giselle and convention-defying spirit could be said to mirror the social image of the ballerina herself.

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Notwithstanding this reading of the wilis as a potentially subversive element, the fact is that the story ends with Giselle challenging Myrtha and saving her duke, which frees her Christian soul and allows her to go to heaven: pure, romantic, heteronormative love conquers all. Moreover, Giselle’s death permits a romance without an actual inter-class marriage, which could be considered revolutionary. Thus, class distinctions are never questioned; the possibility that Giselle and the duke might actually get married is never considered, and the peasants show humility to the nobles, performing for them without complaint. Even within the wilis there is a figure of authority, Myrtha, whose leadership is never explained, but which is performed with masculinised technique, as if typically feminine steps could never command authority. The wilis may answer to and continue the Gothic in their role and presentation, but there is little fragmentation or disorder to be found in their movements. Their formations are symmetrical and geometrical – straight, in the most literal sense – so their presence is always bound within narrow aesthetic conventions – their dance is supposedly frenzied, but it is never chaotic. The Gothic elements of the story permit the expression of different possibilities and roles for women, but they never succeed; bourgeois hegemonic standards of the time are always upheld. Evan Alderson is famously very critical of Giselle, which he says ends with the protagonist, despite her ‘newly found sisterhood’, denying her own power ‘in the service of the male’ and alleviating male guilt.56 Meglin takes this critical view further:

The translucent female body, dancing between light and darkness, evoked man’s spiritual, transcendent capacities and led him out of the prosaic present, the world of men and lack of imagination. A woman persecuted, killed, and resurrected embodied a retelling of the Christ story for modern times.57

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However, she maintains that ‘the splintering of perspectives inherent in the fantastic genre was well suited to ballet performance, with its multiple collaborators, ritual- like re-enactment, and simultaneous different angles of viewing’;58 ‘Women’s dominant presence as performers in the ballet (…) and their self-actualizing performances mitigated the raw brutality of the contes, returning the unveiling of the female corpse to mystical, almost spiritual terms’.59 Resistant readings, then, are still possible. While conventional gender roles are not actually challenged, this does not mean that they go unexplored. Davies Cordoba writes:

This array of single women – the cohort of wilis and their queen, mother, daughter, fiancée – participated in the period’s discourse about women in the public and private spheres: their assigned roles, their contestation about choices, the acknowledgement of their availability, together with society’s indecision about the role of the Church within post-revolutionary France.60

In conclusion, Giselle was a text that fit the social and stylistic conventions of France in 1841, being written by male intellectuals for a mostly bourgeois audience with access to means for patronage and cultural criticism. It crystallised an essentialist image of femininity through gendered technique and costumes which erased social differences between female characters, playing up binary distinctions between genders. Nonetheless, in its Gothic elements – although limited – the audience could discover the possibility of alternative, freer societies, in which women might exercise power, even if they were demonised by the narrative. The wilis fail in their attempt to kill the duke, but they are not vanquished; they still roam the forest, a perpetual reminder of their victimisation. The otherworldly aspect of the Gothic created a strong contrast with the more realistic elements, and both were embodied in the ballerina, who in her professionalism presented an alternative lifestyle for many

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women, even if she was read as a commodity or a threat by the public. This is not to say that the potential for subversion that the Gothic opens in Giselle is still found in contemporary ballets that still align themselves with that genre – rather, it answers to its time and place of production. Nonetheless, the reasons for its continuity and its role in 21st century ballets, with their cyborg wings and vampire godmothers – alternative readings of monstrosity, perhaps – are worth studying. P a g e | 24

Works cited

Alderson, Evan, ‘Ballet as Ideology: "Giselle", Act II’, Dance Chronicle, 10, 3 (1987). 290-304.

Buchan, David and Edward D. Ives, ‘Tale Roles and Revenants: A Morphology of Ghosts’, Western Folklore, 45, 2 (1986). 143-160.

Butler, Judith, ‘Critically Queer’, GLQ, 1 (1993). 17-32.

Challamel, Jules, ‘Carlotta Grisi dans le rôle de Giselle’ [Lithograph]. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. (1842) http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8420616j.r=giselle%20album%20opera [Accessed June 2016]

Chazin-Bennahum, Judith. The Lure of Perfection: Fashion and Ballet, 1780-1830. (New York: Routledge, 2005).

Chapman, John. ‘Jules Janin: Romantic Critic’ in Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic Ballet, ed. by Lynn Garafora (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), pp.197-241.

Clark, Maribeth. ‘Understanding French Grand Opera Through Dance’, (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1998).

Cooper, Bill, ‘Giselle, The Royal Ballet’ [Photograph]. Royal Opera House, London (2014). http://www.roh.org.uk/productions/giselle-by-peter-wright [Accessed June 2016]

Davidson, Hilary, ‘Fantasy, Fetish, and the Red Shoe’, Financial Times, 5 June 2015. [Accessed 24 October 2015]. P a g e | 25

Franko, Mark, ‘Dance and the Political: States of Exception’, Dance Research Journal, 38, 1/2 (2006). 3-18.

Genné, Beth, ‘Creating a Canon: Creating the 'Classics' in Twentieth-Century British Ballet’, Dance Research: The Journal for the Society for Dance Research,18, 2 (2000). 132-162.

Howells, Coral Ann, Love, Mystery and Misery. Feeling in Gothic Fiction, London: The Athlone Press, 1978.

Juhasz, Suzanne, ‘Queer Swans: Those Fabulous Avians in the Swan Lakes of Les Ballets Trockadero and Matthew Bourne’, Dance Chronicle, 31, 1 (2008). 54-83.

Kant, Marion (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Ballet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Online edition.

Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York: Methuen Inc, 1980.

Meglin, Joellen A, ‘Behind the Veil of Translucence: An Intertextual Reading of the “Ballet Fantastique” in France, 1831-1841. Part One. Ancestors of the Sylphide in the Conte Fantastique’, Dance Chronicle, 27, 1 (2004). 67-129.

----- ‘Behind the Veil of Translucence: An Intertextual Reading of the "Ballet Fantastique" in France, 1831-1841. Part Two: The Body Dismembered, Diseased, and Damned: The "Conte Brun"’, Dance Chronicle, 27, 3 (2004). 313- 371.

----- ‘Behind the Veil of Translucence: An Intertextual Reading of the "Ballet Fantastique" in France, 1831-1841. Part Three. Resurrection, Sensuality, and P a g e | 26

the Palpable Presence of the Past in Théophile Gautier's Fantastic’, Dance Chronicle, 28, 1 (2005). 67-142.

Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works, ed. by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001). 342-352.

Lormier, Paul, ‘Giselle, paysanne’, in Giselle ou les Willis: Six maquettes de costumes [Design in pencil and watercolour]. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. (1841). http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8454556s/f5.item.r=lormier%20giselle [Accessed June 2016]

----- ‘Giselle’, in Giselle ou les Willis: Six maquettes de costumes [Design in pencil and watercolour]. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. (1841). http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8454556s/f7.item.r=lormier%20giselle [Accessed June 2016]

Smith, Andrew and William Hughes. The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

Smith, Marian E, ‘What Killed Giselle?’, Dance Chronicle, 13, 1 (1990). 68-81.

Uspenski, Andrej, ‘Akane Takada in Giselle’ [Photograph]. Royal Opera House, London. (2016) http://www.roh.org.uk/productions/giselle-by-peter-wright [Accessed June 2016]

P a g e | 27

‘Mute and beautiful, she played with dolls ... mute and beautiful she killed’1: Anne Rice’s Vampire Child

Donna Mitchell

Celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) was the first Gothic novel to offer a revisionist portrayal of this figure. Rice presents the vampire as a guilt-ridden hero who moves from his peripheral position in earlier texts to a central role as the story’s narrator and protagonist. As a vampire child and one of the main characters in this novel, Claudia is the first female figure of The Vampire Chronicles. Her dual existence as both woman and child confirms that her identity is problematic in terms of gender issues and social order. Furthermore, she can be read as a dangerous threat to male supremacy as represented by Lestat in this text. Her character can be psychoanalytically described as the ‘monstrous feminine’, which is a term that critic Sarah Gamble defines as being the ‘feminine excess [that] exorcises fears regarding female sexuality and women’s ability to procreate’.2 Barbara Creed adds that this classification is a simple reversal of the traditional male monster, but ‘as with all other stereotypes of the feminine ... [the female monster] is defined in terms of her sexuality’.3 This expression then highlights the ‘importance of her gender in the construction of her monstrosity’.4 When Claudia first enters Interview with the Vampire, she epitomises innocence and female passivity as the six-year-old girl who becomes Louis’ first victim. The true complexity of her character is only revealed when it becomes clear that she possesses an adult psyche that is forever trapped within the body of a

1 Anne Rice. Interview with the Vampire. (London: Time Warner Books, 1976), p.108. 2 Sarah Gamble. Ed. The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism. (London: Routledge, 2006), p.253. 3 Barbara Creed. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. (London: Routledge, 1993), p.3. 4 Ibid., p.3. P a g e | 28

vampire child. In many ways, the paradoxical traits of her character resemble Carmilla from Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella of the same name. This paper will discuss the vampire child in Gothic literature by exploring various components of Claudia’s character in The Vampire Chronicles, and in doing so will also explore how certain aspects relate to the traditional vampire child in Carmilla.

Gothic critic Margarita Georgieva states that the nature of the Gothic child is defined by its ‘absence, loss, uncertainty and mystery’.5 These features are undeniably evident in Claudia possibly because her character was inspired by Rice’s five-year- old daughter, Michele, who died from leukaemia the year before she wrote Interview with the Vampire. Rice reincarnates Michele through the character of Claudia, who is a six-year-old orphan that enters the novel as one of Louis’s victims. She is later given immortality by Lestat in a desperate attempt to create a vampire family of his own. On their first meeting, Louis describes her as a ‘jointless doll ... [with] satin hair’6 that was crying next to her mother’s corpse. This terminology denotes her identity to that of an idol according to his perspective, and though he abandons her before she is fully dead, they are later reunited by Lestat. Her position within their vampire family is secured by Louis’ annihilation of her human family as, the ‘drinking of the child’s blood stands for the complete consumption of a family [because] it obliterates the memory and history of its members’.7 Additionally, Lestat engages in a parental masquerade on the night of her death when he pretends to be her father. It arises once again during a subverted act of breastfeeding whereby he becomes her substitute mother and feeds his blood to her in order to complete the transition. Louis recognises the contradictory terms of her vampire identity immediately afterwards when she still ‘held [Lestat’s] wrist to her mouth, a growl coming out of her ... [but] then she looked at him with the most innocent

5 Margarita Georgieva. The Gothic Child. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p.108. 6 Rice, pp. 82-3. 7 Georgieva, p.120. P a g e | 29

astonishment’.8 He admits to being mesmerised by her new form and states that, despite her lingering childlike physicality, ‘[s]he was sensual ... her eyes were a woman’s eyes; I could see it already’.9 These terms highlight the paradoxical state of her new form as she now possesses an angelic and seductive exterior that disguises her underlying deadly nature. In order to both emphasise the peculiarity of these contrasting features and separate her mortal identity from her immortal identity, he clarifies that ‘[s]he was not a child any longer, she was a vampire child’.10

When considered in relation to Carmilla, Claudia’s rebirth appears to mirror certain details of Le Fanu’s text such as Laura’s first meeting with the vampire child which occurs during her early childhood years when she appears as a strange night-time visitor. Her ethereal beauty is noted in Laura’s description of how she was ‘so beautiful and so indescribably engaging’11 despite possessing an inner ‘coldness’ that was ‘beyond her years’.12 Her gentleness during their first encounter is similar to Lestat’s initial care with Claudia and even suggests a return of the absent maternal figure through the subverted union of a mother breastfeeding her infant. Laura describes how Carmilla initially lulls her back to sleep only to be suddenly awoken ‘by a sensation as if two needles ran into [her] breast very deep at the same moment’.13 Her depiction of this embrace evokes an image of painful penetration that highlights the deadly nature of Carmilla’s true self despite her outer facade and also signifies the loss of Laura’s childhood innocence.

From the moment of her transformation, Claudia embodies the silence that is an inherent trait of all female Rician vampires, and as a new-born vampire, she is

8 Ibid., p.102. 9 Ibid, pp.103-4. 10 Ibid., p.104. 11 Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Carmilla. (Rockville: Wildside Press, 2004), p.29 12 Ibid., p.32. 13 Ibid., p.10. P a g e | 30

described as being ‘mysteriously quiet’.14 Louis stresses the uncanny nature of her silence in his revelation that ‘mute and beautiful, she played with dolls, dressing, undressing them by the hour. Mute and beautiful she killed’.15 The repetition in this sentence reveals her clinical approach to hunting despite her youth and inexperience. Initially, they believe that her silence means she is content in her role as their vampire child and spoil her with fine clothing and dolls. Louis’ aforementioned tendency to further dehumanise her is now duplicated by Lestat as he plays with her ‘as if she were a magnificent doll’.16 They ignore obvious signs of her psychological development, such as her interest in the works of ‘Aristotle or Boethius’17 and her ability to play Mozart by ear, and simply declare her ‘a mystery [because] it was not possible to know what she knew or did not know’18 anymore. Her evolving maturity soon becomes evident through the refinement of her killing technique, which relies heavily upon the realisation that she can use her childlike innocence as a masquerade to lure unsuspecting victims to their death:

[T]o watch her kill was chilling. She would sit alone in the dark square waiting for the kindly gentleman or woman to find her, her eyes ... mindless ... Like a child numbed with fright she would whisper her plea for help to her gentle, admiring patrons, and as they carried her out of the square, her arms would fix about their necks, her tongue between her teeth, her vision glazed with consuming hunger.19

Her manipulation of her victims before killing them is another feature that can be found in Le Fanu’s novella, as Carmilla assumes the masquerade of a young and

14 Rice, p.108. 15 Ibid., p.108. 16 Ibid., p.110. 17 Ibid., p.111. 18 Ibid., p.111. 19 Ibid., p.111. P a g e | 31

sickly girl to fool Laura’s father into welcoming her into his home. This practice can be analysed through Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of the ‘masculine protest’, which calls for the female figure to ‘masculinise herself’ by imitating characteristics of the male figure according to the social paradigm of gender performativity, or alternatively, to ‘make use of her feminine weapons to wage war on the male’.20 Both Claudia and Carmilla exemplify both aspects of this theory; firstly, by emulating the masculine behaviour of actively seeking out their object of desire in an effort to fulfil their primal need for sexual relations or blood, and secondly, by acquiring a facade of helplessness in order to both ensnare their victims and deceive the patriarchal figureheads of their texts.

Both characters also appear to spend their immortal lives mourning the loss of their biological mothers as is depicted by their hunting patterns. Claudia’s penchant for female victims is revealed in Louis’ discovery that ‘she did not kill indiscriminately. She fell into demanding patterns ... [and] seemed obsessed with women and children’.21 Her exclusive pursuit of mothers and daughters illustrates her fixation and jealousy of the familial bond between women who represent an intimate relationship that she is denied in her immortal form. Additionally, her fixation with these particular victims suggests that she seeks out women through whom she wishes to live vicariously because they embody the elements of maternal love and freedom that are missing in her life. In other words, she searches for external projections of herself when choosing her victims. Her killing process includes a ritualistic unification of her victim’s corpses as detailed in her murder of two female servants. The arrangement of their bodies foreshadows her later death with Madeline, as this particular pair is found with ‘the arm of the mother fastened around the waist of the daughter, the daughter’s head bent against the mother’s

20 Simone de Beauvoir. The Second Sex. (London: Vintage, 1997), p.74. 21 Rice, p.115. P a g e | 32

breast’.22 Their deathly union is similar to the layout of the burnt vampire corpses which will be found with ‘Madeline’s lovely red hair mingled with the gold of Claudia’s hair ... Madeline still bore the stamp of her living face .... But the child, the ancient one ... Claudia, was ashes’.23

Similarly, Carmilla is obsessed with finding female victims and preys specifically on young girls. She demonstrates her maternal grief in an alternative manner that sees her perform the role of substitute mother to Laura, which encourages the development of their bond and the subsequent fusion of their identities. Her pursuit of Laura resumes twelve years after their first encounter in her bedroom. When Laura recognises her ‘pretty, even beautiful’24 face as belonging to the same lady from her childhood memory, she feels repulsed by Carmilla, but this sensation is quickly repressed when Carmilla claims to have had a reciprocating vision of Laura. Her ability to manipulate Laura is further demonstrated by her false claim that she does not ‘know which one [of them] should be most afraid of the other’,25 and moreover, that if Laura ‘were less pretty [she] should be very much afraid of [her]’.26 These apparently mutual confessions are significant because they highlight a blurring of their identities, and illustrate Carmilla’s ability to gain her victim’s trust by suggesting that they have always been connected to each other.

Rice admits that the numerous doll analogies used to describe Claudia are intentional because they emphasise the paradoxical blend of ‘innocence and beauty with a sinister quality’27 that her character conveys. Georgieva asserts that, while the doll-and-child motif has always been a feature of Gothic texts, over time it has

22 Ibid., p.117. 23 Ibid., p.328. 24 Le Fanu, p.26. 25 Ibid., p.28. 26 Ibid., p.28 27 Katherine Ramsland. The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles. (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1995), p.107. P a g e | 33

‘acquired some of the threatening qualities ‘unnatural’ mothers … attributed to the child’.28 It can also be argued that these analogies are employed in an attempt to further dehumanise her as they become more prevalent when Louis starts to realise the increasingly contradictory state of her inner psyche and outer physicality. He regards her with a repulsion that mimics Laura’s feeling towards Carmilla as he details her transition from innocent child to one whose face became ‘more and more ... doll-like ... [as] she became an eerie and powerful seductress’.29 Her ability to seduce Louis resembles Carmilla’s ability to enthral Laura into ‘foolish embraces [from] which I used to wish to extricate myself [but] her murmured words sounded like a lullaby in my ear, and soothed my resistance into a trance, from which I only seemed to recover myself when she withdrew her arms’.30 Louis dismisses Claudia’s power over him by once again reducing her status to that of an idol by calling her his ‘doll ... That’s what she was. A magic doll’.31 He gives her countless porcelain dolls that act as her doubles because they are designed to be ‘replica[s] of [her and] always wear a duplicate of [her] newest dress’.32 This practice stresses his need to still view her as a child despite his knowledge of her maturing mentality, which subsequently shows his inability to see her as an equal. Doubling can also be found in Carmilla when Laura finds an old portrait of her maternal ancestor and claims that the picture’s image bears an uncanny resemblance to her vampire companion. She also discovers additional revisions or doubles of Carmilla when she discovers her previous identities as ‘Mircalla’33 and ‘Millarca’.34

28 Georgieva, p.186. 29 Rice, pp.112-3. 30 Le Fanu, p.33. 31 Rice, p.113. 32 Ibid., p.214. 33 Le Fanu, p.105. 34 Ibid., p.106. P a g e | 34

Claudia’s desire to gain freedom from her vampire fathers appears to stem from her awareness of the powerlessness of her position within their family. When considered from a psychoanalytic perspective, this can be read as a natural stage of childhood development and exemplifies Freud’s notion of ‘the neurotic’s family romance’, which is a fantasy system that occurs during the ‘liberation of an individual, as [they] grow up, from the authority of [their] parents’.35 Although this phase is essential for the child’s self-awareness and social skills, it inevitably creates tension within the family unit. Nonetheless, Freud dismisses this side-effect as a necessary conclusion since ‘the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations’.36 This process begins at a young age when the child sees the parents as their ‘only authority and the source of all belief’37 whom they desperately wish to emulate. But as their intellect develops, the child compares their own parents to others, thus destroying their former belief of the parents’ exclusivity and causing the child to become critical of them. Claudia’s awareness of the unconventional set up of their family unit awakens in her a subsequent desire for revenge and freedom, which proves to be a major catalyst for her descent into madness.

The ‘family romance’ occurs twice in her development: on the first occasion, she casts Louis in the maternal role and focuses her energy on replacing Lestat as the dominant head of the family unit. On the second occasion, she wishes to eradicate Louis’s maternal role by leaving him to start a new life with Madeline as her parent and protector. This is a traditional depiction of the family romance because the wish for freedom comes from the child’s natural desire to gain independence from its parental figures. It only happens when Claudia has confidence in her survival

35 Sigmund Freud. ‘Family Romances’ in James Strachey. Ed. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IX (1906-1908): Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works, 235-42. (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1909), p.237. 36 Ibid., p.237. 37 Ibid., p.237. P a g e | 35

without them and wants to rebel against their tendency to control and condition her according to their specifications. The innocent disguise of her youthful appearance masks the inner turmoil of her adult mind and lulls them into a false sense of security as she plots vengeance for their crimes. But her failure to survive without them becomes evident when she is unable to gain a new physicality over time. This confirms her helplessness, which in turn anticipates her inevitable demise when considered psychoanalytically through Bettelheim’s claim that ‘only if the maiden grows into a woman, can life go on’38 for her. Claudia can be viewed as a personification of this statement because her inability to reproduce or become an adult woman proves to be her downfall. As a result, she becomes increasingly hopeless about her physical entrapment and wishes to embody a woman’s form. Her later attempt to literally become a double of herself by attaching a female vampire’s body to her decapitated head, leads to her final death.39

Claudia’s lack of knowledge about the events surrounding her human death is similar to many other Gothic children, who are generally ‘aware that what they have been told about their early life may not be the whole truth. Some feel incomplete; others suspect a secret, while others are plainly informed by their supposed parents that something has for long been hidden from them’.40 Her intention to discover the truth surrounding her death creates in her an ominous silence that does not go unnoticed by Lestat. He confesses to feeling threatened by her, which suggests that she is only considered a real danger to her patriarchal figureheads when they

38 Bruno Bettelheim. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p.234. 39 Although readers of Interview with the Vampire are led to believe that Claudia dies in the sunlight with Madeline, it is revealed in The Vampire Armand that she was subjected to a head transplant before her death. Armand admits to attempting to transfer her head to the body of an adult female vampire. He also confesses having no choice but to expose her remains to the sunlight when it was unsuccessful (Rice 1998, 271). This revelation will be discussed in further detail in a later section. 40 Georgieva, p.107. P a g e | 36

recognise her state of transgressive womanhood or her monstrous femininity. Their fears are confirmed by Louis’ realisation that ‘[s]he’s not a child any longer ... I don’t know what it is. She’s a woman,’41 while Lestat threatens to ‘break [her] into a thousand pieces’42 if she continues to challenge his supremacy. As her anger towards Lestat continues to gain momentum, she voices her frustration by raising the notion of reproduction. She suggests that together they ‘could people the world with vampires, the three of us,’43 only to be informed by Lestat that she would not have the strength to complete the transformation. He antagonises her further by speaking about the beauty of womanly ‘endowments that [she] will never possess’.44 These scathing remarks, as well as his reluctance to discuss the true events of her death, add to her mounting frustration and encourage her revenge plot. Her ability to do so without any hint of remorse marks the maturation of her state of mind. She finally succeeds in gaining her independence from him when she gives him a false peace offering in the form of two young orphans that she has poisoned using a deadly concoction of absinthe and laudanum that will ‘put [him] in [his] coffin ... forever’.45

While devising her plan, Claudia uncovers the details surrounding her death including Louis’ involvement in the process. Her discovery allows her to manipulate him into helping her avenge their mortality by killing Lestat and in doing so, confirms her status as a threat to the patriarchal authority of their little family. Her excitement at the thought of murdering Lestat illustrates her lack of humanity as she admits that ‘the secret is .... I want to kill him. I will enjoy it’.46 Her demeanour during this confession takes on an uncanny reptilian quality that repulses Louis once again; he recounts his reaction to seeing ‘her tongue [move] suddenly between her

41 Rice, pp.116-7. 42 Ibid., p.121. 43 Ibid., p.145. 44 Ibid., p.147. 45 Ibid., p.150. 46 Ibid., p.137. P a g e | 37

teeth and [touch] her lower bottom lip in a strange flicker that sent a mild shock through my body ... I felt something palpable and helpless in my hands’.47 His response to witnessing this gesture mirrors the revulsion that Laura experiences when she realises Carmilla’s ability to shape-shift into a ‘sooty-black ... monstrous cat’48 that attacks her before reverting back to her original form. Fred Botting argues that the imagery of this feline creature presents a negative view of female sexuality because it represents Carmilla’s ‘sexual, primitive regression and independent femininity’,49 as well as the feral threat of violence that lies within her. He states that the ability to shape-shift is a significant reason why her presence is a risk to the social order of the text because it implies that she does not have ‘a singular or stable nature or identity’.50 Her embodiment of different versions of the self despite her role as the ‘Other’ (or the outsider of the text), is a characteristic of many subsequent Gothic tales, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula for which her character was a huge inspiration. This chameleon-like quality also allows her to move effortlessly between even the strictest of familial and sexual boundaries as defined by patriarchal society. Although Claudia does not share Carmilla’s ability to shape-shift, her reptilian demeanour in the above passage reminds the reader that her identity is equally ambiguous.

Soon after they relocate to Europe, Claudia and Louis begin to drift apart and eventually they seek out new companions. Claudia wishes for a substitute mother and finds a suitable match in doll-maker, Madeline, with whom she becomes fascinated when she discovers her ability to create a ‘lady doll’.51 She tells Louis that Madeline’s doll shop is filled with numerous versions of the same baby doll that bears a striking resemblance to her dead daughter, and coincidentally to Claudia as

47 Ibid., p.136. 48 Le Fanu, p.52. 49 Fred Botting. Gothic. (New York: Routledge, 1996), p.94. 50 Botting, p.98. 51 Rice, p.224. P a g e | 38

well. Despite their similarity to her, she has no interest in them and instead requests a lady doll to signify her inner maturity. Her dramatic destruction of this figure, which she crushes with her hand, ‘popping it so it bobbed and broke in a heap of glass that fell from her open, bloody hand’,52 foreshadows her own gruesome death which happens soon after this performance. Firstly however, she convinces Louis to turn Madeline so that she can replace him as her vampire companion and substitute mother. In order to prove her devotion to Claudia, Madeline burns the doll shop and erases any remaining memory of her other daughter. The fire prefigures the burning to which Claudia and Madeline will soon be subjected as Lestat, Louis, and the reader of Interview with the Vampire are all led to believe that Claudia meets her death after a short trial in the Thèâtre des Vampires when the coven find her guilty of the ultimate vampire sin: the attempted murder of her creator. They condemn her to final death as punishment for her crime against Lestat. It is not until a much later text of The Vampire Chronicles that Armand confesses his participation in the true events of her demise, during which he reveals details of her attempt to attach herself to a female form that may give her the strength to create the vampire progeny that her original childlike state could not. In The Vampire Armand, he recounts how, on her request, he decapitated her in order to re-attach her head to the body of another adult vampire that would give her the form that she had always desired, but instead created ‘a writhing jerking catastrophe’ that was ‘a botched reassemblage of the angelic child she had [once] been’.53 Unable to reverse the damage, he puts this spoilt version of Claudia into the sunlight to be destroyed.

Armand’s revelation raises the notion of multiple deaths which is a typical feature of the Gothic genre and can be applied to both Claudia and Carmilla. In total, Claudia dies on four occasions: Her first death is a false death which occurs on the first night Louis drinks from her and is overcome with guilt and certainty that he

52 Ibid., p.225. 53 Anne Rice. The Vampire Armand. (London: Vintage, 1998), p.271. P a g e | 39

has murdered her. Her second death is her human death which happens when Lestat drains her and transforms her into a vampire child. Her third death is a staged death as it is her assumed destruction while wrapped in the arms of Madeline. Her fourth and final death is Armand’s experimental head transplant that leads to her sunlight burning, which takes place in the same location as Madeline’s earlier annihilation so that their remains are found mixed together. Similarly, Le Fanu’s text suggests Carmilla’s ability to experience a similar number of deaths as discussed in relation to doubling. The first allusion to Carmilla’s other lives (and deaths) arises when Laura recognises that the lady in their old family portrait of Countess Karnstein is an identical ‘effigy to Carmilla’.54 Later on, she also discovers that Carmilla has had various other lives as women known only as Mircalla and Millarca, which subsequently reveals previous attempts to inhabit their family home and bloodline. In addition to these revelations, Carmilla also experiences a violent death at the hands of the novella’s group of men once they realise that she is a vampire. Their method of killing her is also decapitation, which can be considered in Freudian terms as a castration that de-masculinises the female demon ‘who has expressed an inappropriately masculine and active sexual desire’.55 This act is then also symbolic in terms of being a phallic subversion of her earlier penetration of Laura, thus suggesting that her death ensures gender roles have been returned to their proper state by the end of the story. Yet there is a strong implication that Carmilla has cheated death once again and survived their attack as insinuated by Laura’s admission that she can still ‘hear the light step of [her] at the drawing room door’.56

54 Le Fanu, p.44. 55 Creed cited in Per Faxneld. ‘Feminist Vampires and the Romantic Satanist Tradition of Counter-Readings’ in Gabriela Madlo and Andrea Ruthven. Eds. Woman as Angel, Woman as Evil: Interrogating Boundaries. (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010), p.3. 56 Le Fanu, p.108.

P a g e | 40

The corresponding traits between Claudia and Carmilla strongly suggest that the figure of the vampire child in Gothic literature exemplifies social concerns regarding female sexuality and autonomy. Both characters demonstrate how the vampire child personifies feminine vulnerability and female transgressiveness as shown in their dependence on the display of an innocent façade in order to successfully hunt and survive. Additionally, they seem to exhibit a shared grief for the loss of their human lives, particularly in relation to their inability to experience maternal love. The absence of this familial bond appears to have a strong influence over their behaviour, which raises the issue of the texts’ subliminal messages concerning the importance of woman’s role as mother and nurturer. Finally, the punishment and removal of these vampire children by the end of their stories imply that proper social order will not tolerate female figures that embody the problematic traits of the monstrous feminine.

P a g e | 41

Works Cited

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. (London: Penguin Books, 1991).

Botting, Fred. Gothic. (New York: Routledge, 1996).

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. (London: Routledge, 1993).

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. (London: Vintage, 1997).

Faxneld, Per. ‘Feminist Vampires and the Romantic Satanist Tradition of Counter- Readings’ in Gabriela Madlo and Andrea Ruthven. Eds. Woman as Angel, Woman as Evil: Interrogating Boundaries. (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010).

Freud, Sigmund. ‘Family Romances’ in James Strachey. Ed. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IX (1906-1908): Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works, 235-42. (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1909).

Gamble, Sarah. Ed. The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism. (London: Routledge, 2006).

Gelder, Ken. Reading the Vampire. (London: Routledge, 1994).

Georgieva, Margarita. The Gothic Child. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. Carmilla. (Rockville: Wildside Press, 2004). P a g e | 42

Ramsland, Katherine. The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles. (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1995).

Rice, Anne. Interview with the Vampire. (London: Time Warner Books, 1976).

Rice, Anne. The Vampire Armand. (London: Vintage, 1998). P a g e | 43

Occupational Hazards: Nihilism and Negation in Thomas Ligotti’s ‘Corporate Horror’.

Rachid M’Rabty

Thomas Ligotti’s short stories and novellas, stylistically and philosophically, exhibit the problematic relationship between violence, nihilism and negation, and the increasingly unsettling experience of human existence and work in contemporary post-industrial societies. S. T Joshi argues that the ‘focus of all Ligotti’s work is a systematic assault on the real world and the replacement of it with the unreal’, and here, within Ligotti’s corporate horrors in My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002), I argue this assault takes form through an engagement with corporate systems, their subjects, and their increasing compulsion towards ever more horrific and nightmarish outcomes.1 Schweitzer describes Ligotti’s ‘Corporate Horror’ as tales reflective of the terrifying and ‘dehumanizing effects of large cubicle-filled offices where vast numbers of anonymous, white collar drones waste their lives’.2 This essay develops the concept further, depicting this menagerie of workplace horrors as demonstrative of a specific and terrifying characteristic—that of a ‘shadowy and incomprehensible’ living nightmare that correlates capitalist apparatus and systems of control, to a complete disintegration and ruination of the subject (individual) and the world being driven to a unflinchingly bleak and horrific oblivion.3

1 S. T. Joshi, ‘Thomas Ligotti: The Escape from Life’ in The Thomas Ligotti Reader: Essays and Explorations, ed. by Darrell Schweitzer (Holicong: Wildside Press, 2003) 135—153 (p. 136). 2 Darrell Schweitzer, ‘Ligotti’s Corporate Horror’, in The Thomas Ligotti Reader: Essays and Explorations, ed. by Darrell Schweitzer (Holicong: Wildside Press, 2003) 127—134. (p. 127). 3 Thomas Ligotti, ‘The Nightmare Network’, in My Work is Not Yet Done, (London: Virgin Books, 2009) 169—183. (p. 173). P a g e | 44

Despite a prolific literary career as cult writer within weird/horror fiction circles, Ligotti remains somewhat obscured from a mainstream readership, however he is becoming increasingly acclaimed within wider literary circles as one of the greatest genre horror writers of the last thirty years. For Decades, Ligotti’s fiction has avoided any sustained literary and critical attention for decades, often written off as niche, pessimistic weird fiction or philosophical horror, which—while exhibiting a disconcertingly different world view as anything else on the market—offers little beyond the study of horror fiction conventions and stylistics. Throughout his career, however, he demonstrates a valuable procedural and methodological concern with broader contemporary applications of nihilism within an uncanny and imaginative and decaying literary world-view which is deserving of greater sustained academic enquiry. This paper frames Ligotti’s visions and reimaginings of the machinations of corporate horrors in conversation with contemporary political and subjective interpretations of nihilism and will demonstrate that Ligotti is something of a bleak prophet of the impending annihilation facing a world overcome by its own delusions of meaning and work. While Ligotti engages with the world of work throughout his oeuvre, this essay focuses specifically on how Ligotti’s three most sustained engagements with the corporate world expose horror and fatalistic negation as a means of representing the negative impact of dehumanising corporate agents and the corruption of an ever-decaying world.4 Furthermore, through an awareness of contemporary critical debates in nihilism, such as those led by the likes of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Bülent Diken, Ray Brassier and Eugene Thacker, for example, this paper reads Ligotti’s dark and pessimistic horror as a philosophically concerted effort to represent and respond to and represent the capitulation of a nihilistic

4 Within Teatro Grottesco (London: Virgin, 2008), for example, stories such as ‘My Case for Retributive Action’ (81—98), ‘Our Temporary Supervisor’ (99—118) and ‘The Town Manager’ (22—36) deal explicitly with the nightmare of work and its fatalistic effect on individual subjects, populations and environments. P a g e | 45

world, that is increasingly symptomatic of an advanced state of corporate, post- political capitalism.

My Work is Not Yet Done (2002) is Thomas Ligotti’s sixth published collection following Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1986), Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991), Noctuary (1994), The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales (1994) and The Nightmare Factory (1996).5 The collection itself envisions an increasingly disconsolate and desolate world as the apex of the capitalist/corporate compulsion towards ever more frightening methods of profiteering and control.6 ‘My Work’ is the story of Frank Dominio, a mid-level white collar supervisor for an ambitious and anonymous corporation. Following a strange restructure and a series of uncanny incidents leading to his being fired, Dominio seeks vengeance against those within the company who have conspired against him. However, something strange occurs and Dominio is possessed by a dark force that provides him with grotesque and supernatural powers that enable his increasingly violent retributive acts. This novella, I argue, is part parable for the dehumanising and traumatic effects of corporatism, part exposition of an unknowable and spectral conspiracy driving humanity to ruin, and part manifesto for nihilistic self- destruction as the only remaining worthwhile action. As such, it demonstrates a contentious value as a literary exposition of discordant and annihilating fantasies in spite of an ever-consuming, globalised and post-industrial culture of work.

5 Both Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1986) and Grimsribe: His Lives and Works (1991) in 2015 were republished together under the prestigious Penguin Classics imprint. 6 Thomas Ligotti, My Work is Not Yet Done, (London: Virgin Books, [2002] 2009), henceforth referred to in the abbreviated form My Work (italicised). The collection features one novella and two short stories: the novella ‘My Work is Not Yet Done’, henceforth ‘My Work’ (non-italicised) (pp. 7—138); ‘I Have a Special Plan for This World’, henceforth ‘Special Plan’ (pp. 141—166); and ‘The Nightmare Network’ (pp. 169—183). Ligotti is also author of the extended philosophical study of pessimism and horror, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010), henceforth The Conspiracy. P a g e | 46

‘Special Plan’, is the second story in the collection and follows an unnamed protagonist in his position within another strange and ambitious corporate company within the ominously named ‘Murder City’. The company itself are specialists in the amendment of documents and while little else can be discerned about the mechanics of their mode of business, the company is driven by a toxic desire to become a global powerhouse and dominate their surroundings and the world marketplace. This poisonous aspiration, however, spills outwards, expunging itself into the surrounding urban spaces in the form of an increasing thick, yellowish haze that coincides with the accelerating social and environmental degeneration of these areas and the increasing rate at which supervisors and former employees are being found dead on within the city.

Finally, ‘The Nightmare Network’, is an utterly bleak nihilistic fantasy and presents a terrible and disturbing vision of an off-key, post-human future. In a series of classified ads and memos, we piece together the cumulative advancement, acceleration and deterioration of two opposing, yet inter-reliant, globalised (even cosmic) organisations, compulsively driven to an annihilating and self-destructive implosion. These fragments describe the corporate merger between the cosmic/virtual and horrific Nightmare Network, and the hyper-capitalist Oneiric Corporation—one company seemingly specialising in the manufacture and dissemination of dreams, the other of nightmares—and their subsequent acceleration of even greater levels of destruction. Within these fragments the merger between the two diametrically opposed—yet inter-reliant—forces leads to a bleak conclusion. A conclusion in which humans are relegated and parasitically drained, meanwhile the corporations contort, extend and survive, seemingly driven by malevolent, compulsive authorities lurking beyond the known world.

P a g e | 47

This paper maintains that these stories raise tough questions about the relationship between the world of work, the human subject and the horror of the unknown, which underpins and drives a mutually destructive synthesis of the two. In doing so, this paper demonstrates that these texts can be read as a sustained critique of consuming, malignant and inescapable—somewhat metaphysical—corporatism, and the decaying human world in which it overlaps. This paper also makes allusions towards the extent that Ligotti’s self-destructive fantasies of nihilism raise deeply unnerving questions about the futility and lack of individual and societal alternatives to an advanced-capitalist/corporate state of reality. In doing so, this paper provides a timely addition to studies of a somewhat overlooked contemporary master and in doing so, develops a case for the value of nihilistic pessimism and Gothic horror as vehicles of subversion and discord against corporatism.

The concept of nihilism itself, which has so far been alluded to, is an emotive one which is often critically repellent and hindered by naïve, popular assumptions that it designates simply an acceptance of meaninglessness and the subsequent embrace of death. Such a reputation tends to choke or repel critical debate, however for Ligotti these kinds of themes precisely mark a value in nihilism that aids the critical unpacking of Ligotti’s nihilistic/pessimistic fictions. First and foremost, nihilism as a methodology, developed within The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010) and witnessed throughout Ligotti’s fiction is, both, a consequence and channel of discontent gestating from an intellectual awareness and sensitivity to meaninglessness and the dreadfulness of human existence.

Thomas Ligotti’s corporate horror stories in My Work are some of the most concerted and procedural efforts of contemporary horror to recreate the mood of dreadful anguish and the terrifying experience of the human subject in the wake of a dominating, nihilistic and degenerative corporate apparatus within contemporary society. In what follows, I frame reading of these unflinchingly bleak stories against P a g e | 48

contemporary debates in politically-focused and speculative nihilism to demonstrate that Ligotti rejects any positive outcome that might be speculatively found within nihilism. In doing so I interpret Ligotti’s drive toward fantasies of the unknown and destruction as fatalistic alternatives to the corporate horror of the uncanny, post-industrial settings and situations his short stories explore.

Through Frank Dominio, in ‘My Work’, Ligotti diagnoses the grotesque nature of the modern market’s strategically nihilistic aim to manipulate all activity and human effort into the production of ‘the ultimate product – Nothing’, for which global corporations, states and empowered individuals would ‘command the ultimate price – Everything’.7 This leads to a scene of total global desolation, in which there stands only:

[A] single, shining, windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside would be – will be – only a dense network of computers calculating profits8

Whilst outside desolate and savage hordes of vagrants, with no comprehension of the world the building represents, gather and stare in petrified amazement and horror. It is a fantasy of the world also reflected in ‘The Red Tower’, which reveals the ‘profound hostility between the noisy and malodorous operations’ and ‘even more corrupt phases of production’, and the ‘purity of the landscape surrounding it’, thus highlighting the degenerative scene of the world to be left behind by an impending and destructive acceleration of capitalist and corporate systems.9

7 Thomas Ligotti, ‘My Work is Not Yet Done’, in My Work is Not Yet Done, (London: Virgin Books, 2009) 7—138. (p. 43). 8 Ligotti, ‘My Work’, p. 43. 9 Thomas Ligotti, ‘The Red Tower’, in Teatrto Grottesco (London: Virgin Books, 2008) 65—77 (p. 66; p. 77; p. 66). P a g e | 49

Bülent Diken’s Nihilism calls Capital ‘the harbinger of pure chaos’ and exhibits a rigorous sociological attack and deconstruction of the underhand and empty state of contemporary social and political apparatus which demonstrate an ‘indifference to social reality [that is] the source of a complex, systemic violence’.10 Throughout, he critiques the complacencies which beguile contemporary socio-political conditions, and outlines the conflictual, yet inter-reliant relationship between the passive, post-political nihilism of capitalism and its opposite, the radical and destructive nihilism of violence and terror(ism). ‘For all its violence’, he argues, ‘the antagonism between terror and post-politics is a false one’ that suspends and obscures the more pertinent nihilistic antagonism between ‘Capital-God and living labour, between the nihilism of sovereign exception, of biopolitics, and life’.11

Of Ligotti’s corporate horror stories, ‘The Nightmare Network’ particularly stands out as an interrogation of the competition between a monstrously other, destructive and terrifying force (The Nightmare Network) and the more identifiably proto- capitalist corporate juggernaut OneiriCon, who are so closely linked that their eventual synthesis through a ‘hostile merger’ becomes the only logical activity.12 Both corporations, devoid of any human concern or interest, seeming hold a monopoly of the known and the unknown, from their diametrically opposed positions. Their synthesis, then, of nightmarish terror and a more recognisable corporatism results in the systematic revitalisation of the shadowy and aggressive impulses, power and impetus that cannot be limited or fixed and which corresponds in the corrosion of humanity via the increasing apparent dehumanisation of the oppressed workers themselves.13 Moreover, the result of this pseudo-antagonism between nightmarish, otherworldly forces and known-world, identifiably capitalist organisations and

10 Bülent Diken, Nihilism, (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 68. 11 Diken, p. 89. 12 Ligotti, ‘The Nightmare Network’, p. 180—1. 13 Ligotti, ‘The Nightmare Network’, p. 182; p. 172. P a g e | 50

apparatus, is the wider sense of inevitability at the dissolution of the hopeless human world. This is disturbingly described when Dominio notes the dismal presence of ‘living ghosts’ and ‘human detritus’ increasingly populating all spaces in the world, who represent not only the human waste being ever-more rapidly excreted by the corporate, capitalist world—but also, who represent Ligotti’s own pessimistic vision of a bleak (lack of) human futurity, and future that ‘awaits all the empires infesting this earth, not to mention the imminent fall of those fragile homelands of flesh we each inhabit.’14

The supposed ‘real conflict’, Diken alludes to, between ‘living labour’ and ‘Capital- God’, for Ligotti ends in a resounding and terrifying dehumanisation and annihilation of the individual. It is also, as Berardi explores in Soul at Work (2009), that the machinations of capitalism set into motion the ‘estrangement’ of the soul from the increasingly alienated worker and the corporations within which they are formed, manipulated and mobilised by and traces the shift from material production to an increasingly nihilistic and immaterial (anti-) production, or the production of nihil itself in the form of capital.15 Increasingly, this is charted in the notable shift from employee as ‘individual’ and ‘soul’, to ‘sensory-deprived’ ‘Approved Labor’, then again, into rigidly and systematically controlled and emotionally vacant ‘Employment Unity with autonomous or semi-autonomous programming’, and finally, merely, ‘cheap data’.16

Nick Land, most strongly associated with a speculative, philosophical development of anti-humanism, acceleration and nihilism in the 1990s, argues that annihilation is the necessary precursor of being able to think the world again. Chaos and

14 Ligotti, ‘My Work’, pp. 38—9. 15 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Soul At Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2009) 16 Ligotti, ‘The Nightmare Network’, p. 171; p. 174; p. 177; p. 183. P a g e | 51

disillusion emerge throughout his writing as counters to modern philosophical complacencies, leading towards the devaluation of the values and an encounter with nihil as fate ‘that aborts the human race.’17 While Land’s works are often considered densely loaded, often schizophrenic, fatalistic and seemingly irrational, for some, his unique mode of critique and theory aligns the ‘deterritorialising depredations of capitalism’ against the ‘prison of human subjectivity and sociality’.18 Somewhat like Ligotti’s speculative, supernatural corporate visions, Land presents a vision of a highly self-destructive, masochistic, accelerated integration and dissolution of humanity within the mechanics of capital, although his visions, contrary to Ligotti, somewhat advocate these processes.

At the close of Ligotti’s collection of malevolent corporations and workplace horrors, only the self-annihilating/self-cannibalising and nihilistic semi-organic organisation remains after all of the destruction described:

Our organization has a life of its own, but without the continuous input of cheap data we cannot compete in today’s apocalyptic marketplace. From a rotting mutation, great illusions may grow. Don’t let us go belly up while the black empty spaces of the galaxy reverberate with hellish laughter. A multi-dimensional, semi-organic discorporation is dreaming . . .19

‘The Nightmare Network’ can be read as a virulent, nihilistic exposition of the dark accelerationist fantasy and the disintegration of humanity through the processes and apparatus of a masochistic corporate organisation. At the end, the organisation

17 Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 13; p. 103. 18 Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Nick Land: Fanged Noumena, Collected Writings 1987—2007 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011) 1—55 (p. 20). 19 Ligotti, ‘The Nightmare Network’, p. 183. P a g e | 52

desperately clings onto its existence within a desolate apocalyptic economy of its own making, the compulsion to expand into new markets, and consume opposition, leads to the bleak fantasy of a desolate and supernatural world of unknowable, reverberating nothingness. As the corporation, however begs to cling onto life, Ligotti’s short story invites us to consider the facilitating and compliant nature of the human subject within the corporate horror. In the next few pages, we will discuss the nature and role of the human subjects within My Work, and examine how nihilism underpins both human compliance within the system and any violent, subjective and horrific alternatives that emerge.

Ray Brassier’s, existential philosophical theory is overcome by a ‘desire to re- establish the meaningfulness of [human] existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature’.20 Such lofty aims, however, are driven by a misplaced, or as Ligotti describes it, obscene sense of human egoism and self-importance. For Brassier, nihilism invokes the speculative or intellectual extinction of humanity so to rethink the world without bias. It is the excess product of, and paradoxically, the answer to an incoherent and unreliable relationship between cognitive thought and reality—the celebration of nihilism as an achievement of intellectual maturity corresponds with an effective intellectual manoeuvre that annuls the world, reducing and relegating ‘reality’ as the correlate of human ego.

Ligotti describes his own vision of a ‘perfect world’, as one in which every person ‘has experienced the annulment of his or her ego’ wherein ‘our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear.’21 Brassier’s nihilism,

20 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. xi. 21 Matt Cardin and Thomas Ligotti, ‘Interview with Thomas Ligotti: It’s All a Matter of Personal Pathology’, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Issue 218, 19.2, (2006) P a g e | 53

however, is not the aggregate of an antinatalist desire dressed in a speculative or cosmic cloak of Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean philosophy. What is at stake, in both of their subjective and ego-denying criticism, is the death of thought itself - leading toward new ethical/philosophical pathways in the relationship between humanity and the (known, and unknown) world. For the contemporary thinker and the deviant protagonists of Ligotti’s stories, ‘My Work’ and ‘Special Plan’, an intellectual and subjective awareness of nihilism provides the toolkit to re-think and expose the limits or parameters of their existence and relationship with the obscured nihil against which reality is built upon.

The unnamed narrator of ‘Special Plan’ mirrors his disintegrating boss, U G Blaine, who drives Blaine and his company to its limits and seems to thrive in wake of the destruction they together have wrought:

[O]nly in this Murder Town could I manage to drive Mr U G Blaine to the uttermost limit of his potential – just as I had driven this city itself […] to the vile and devious limit of its potential, leaving behind an inexplicable yellowish haze, a mere side effect of the things that I had done there, things that I was born to do as a freak of this world 22

This deviant protagonist embodies nihilism, that is, he is the embodiment of a residual accumulation of violent thoughts, ‘propped up by baseless purposes and dreams’.23 However, his ability to recognise the baseless condition of existence and those around him allows him to stand out and act in subversive and increasingly anti-subjective ways so as to ‘affect persons […] in a way that brings unsuspected

[accessed on 25 February 2016] 22 Thomas Ligotti, ‘I Have a Special Plan for This World’, in My Work is Not Yet Done, (London: Virgin Books, 2009), pp. 141—166 (p. 163). 23 Ligotti, ‘Special Plan’, p. 166. P a g e | 54

[negative and supernatural] possibilities and purposes out of hiding’.24 It is interesting that these kinds of ‘qualities’ are attractive to Blaine and the corporate ideology and the narrator’s value, it would appear, is in his terrible ability to bring the unsuspected—i.e. the repressed or negative, destructive drives within others— into the forefront of the psyche, a quality eluded to when he speaks to his colleagues and in doing so incites an antagonistic, nameless dread and realization within them.25 Ultimately, the qualities that bring the narrator into the company, and which make him attractive, are reflective of the deeply perverse operational/corporate logic that the company runs on, specifically, a negative/destructive compulsion to fulfil an obscene sense of potential and exceed limits. In doing so Ligotti’s short story exposes one of the undermining causes of fracture between the company and the employee, that is, the way corporations push their employees beyond reasonable limits and encourage disharmony, alienation and violent conflict as means of production. It is telling that it is only within ‘a crumbling city surrounded by vast, decaying neighbourhoods, its streets filled with hordes of wandering derelicts’, that opportunity and potential presents itself. The corporation thrives on nihilism, furthermore, it drives subjects such as the narrator towards destruction, and in destruction new and terrifying possibilities present themselves.26

As a result, the unnamed, monstrous narrator utilises his negative-affective potential to affect a new, nihilistic pathway, or special plan, that both feeds the corporation and Blaine’s relentless drive, as well as self-destructively tearing apart the egotistical and solipsistic relationship between corporate and human reality and the world which becomes increasingly hostile and shrouded in a poisonous fog. Ultimately, the corporation masochistically appreciates the damage and the

24 Ligotti, ‘Special Plan’, p. 161. 25 Ligotti, ‘Special Plan’, p. 156. 26 Ligotti, ‘Special Plan’, p. 163. P a g e | 55

productive possibilities that such the narrator can create and instil within the workforce and as a result, we can increasingly recognise nihilism as an (anti- )subjective issue throughout Ligotti’s corporate horrors. Whilst nihilism, and the narrator himself, appear as a contrivance to the horrific corporate ideology they however also destroy any synthesis between rationality and reality that supports the interests of corporations over the interests of the human being through the exposition of horror and the conspiracies of the workplace. In doing so, the narrator’s nihilistic actions within the company undermines and destroys the offending corporations themselves—as the subsequent downfall of the mysterious and spectral presence of U G Blaine demonstrates—ultimately leading to an inevitable scene of nihil that the narrator actively desires.27

The values and pressures of ‘life’ in the context of Ligotti’s corporate horrors, are an ‘inescapable delusion’ leading to fearful and apocalyptic ends.28 This sense of delusion corresponds in the obsessive and anxious, agitated psychological state of the individual.29 Conversely, this tension and the managed disintegration of human individual consciousness has a blinding and productive effect, and must be encouraged in order for operations and apparatus to function effectively. In ‘Special Plan’ for example, Blaine’s company managers operate on the basis of maintaining violent and tension-filled working environments and, in ‘The Nightmare Network’, employees engage in ritual acts of psychological and corporeal violence against one another as means of revitalising the aggressive impulse necessary to function within the corporation.30 Above all else, these ritual acts of psychological reconditioning in the workplace bring into focus the horror of the corporate environment, i.e. they disrupt and undermine any subjective or intellectual assumptions that the

27 Brassier, p. xi. 28 Ligotti, ‘My Work’, p. 112. 29 Ligotti, ‘Special Plan’, pp. 143—4. 30 Ligotti, ‘The Nightmare Network’, p. 180. P a g e | 56

individual possesses, replacing them with often baseless nervous compulsions, a corporate persona, and a self-deprecating sense of embitterment. This results in an intolerable and debased sense of ‘agony’ and drive toward alternate fantasies of negation and ‘an act of slaughter against yourself’.31

Thacker argues that today ‘thought is always determined within the framework of the human point of view’ and asks ‘what other alternatives lay open to us?’32 In the wake of increasing apathy and antipathy against contemporary existence, many preeminent thinkers, too, are looking to nihilism as a critical tool to diagnose and counter the ethical, moral and political complacencies of postmodernity, though an engagement with negation and monstrous alterity. Pearson and Morgan, for example, call for intellectual alternatives which designate a return to the intensity and energetics of Nietzsche’s nihilism and the restoration of a sense of his transgressive, ‘hopeful monsters’.33 Critchley argues that nihilism is something to be affirmed, not simply overcome or explained away. They argue that the emergence of ‘meaninglessness’ should be considered ‘an achievement’, facilitating a ‘deeper recognition of the profound limitedness of the human condition, of our frailty and separateness’.34 For Critchley, and likewise, in Brassier’s speculative realist revitalisation of nihilism, the recognition of meaninglessness corresponds in the conception of a new set of esoteric values that place human finitude at the core. The study of Ligotti’s horror provides some speculative answers in its exposition of ‘some imaginary locus of the non-human “out there” in the world’ and in its broad refusal and transvaluation of the ‘well worn dichotomy between self and world, subject and

31 Ligotti, ‘My Work’, p. 7. 32 Eugene Thacker, In The Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1, (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), p. 7. 33 Keith Ansell Pearson and Diane Morgan, eds. Nihilism Now! Monsters of Energy, (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000), p. iiiv. 34 Simon Critchley, Very Little… Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 27. P a g e | 57

object.’35 Horror, for Thacker in particular, is a philosophically potent genre outlining a framework of the world that is not limited by what Ligotti persistently refers to in The Conspiracy as an artificial and tragic, human/subjective perspective, and thus horror fiction is capable of re-thinking the enigmatic and the unthinkable, beyond the constraints of by human existence.36

Themes of human finitude, and the meaningless existential purpose of the human in the world resonate throughout ‘My Work’ and which Frank Dominio seems morbidly, even spitefully obsessed with:

A: There is no grand scheme of things. // B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity.37

As the likes of Thacker attest, philosophy—as currently understood—offers few answers toward an understanding of the horror of the world which presents itself to those like Dominio. Indeed, the very notion of a ‘grand scheme’ or map that attempts to make sense of the world is a ridiculous concept. When Dominio’s supervisor, for example, attempts to organise and re-draw the corporation’s workings, his plans resemble ‘more densely wrought and diabolical version(s) of Dante’s map of Hell’.38 Similarly, the world presented within ‘My Work’ is one that cannot be deciphered, effectively manoeuvred, nor the least bit controlled. Even in his ‘non-living’/beyond-life form, Dominio is still driven by an insidious unseen hand that compels him to ‘work’ and to annihilate to the limits of his capabilities.

35 Thacker, p. 7. 36 Thacker, pp. 8—9. 37 Ligotti, ‘My Work’, p. 14. 38 Ligotti, ‘My Work’, p. 47. P a g e | 58

The metaphor of the puppet-show is one which runs throughout Ligotti’s oeuvre but is, in ‘My Work’, particularly apt. Throughout Dominio’s conspiratorial ramblings, an underlying anxiety that he is a subconsciously being controlled by a great gloved hand within a grotesque corporate ‘puppet show’ emerges, and with it a heightened perception of the meaninglessness of his existence within an even greater corporate conspiracy.39 This distinct lack of control, and meaninglessness to human life, is a nihilistic view shared by the author himself. Throughout The Conspiracy Ligotti argues that any humanistic pretentions that we have either control of self-worth, agency and even a superiority to other beings is a false obscenity and a tragedy: ‘We know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying’ he argues, and we want there to be more to life – the tragedy, however, is that ‘[c]onsciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are – hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones’.40 Dominio is perceptive in his analysis and diagnosis of his condition, identifying himself as little else than an ‘inhuman malefactor’ cursed with the supernatural horror and nightmare of existence, ‘with no good excuse for [his] abominable actions’.41 This anxiety over a perceived lack of control repeatedly surfaces throughout the novella where Dominio is overcome by one obsessive anxiety or another, and in his fear that the world of work, aided and abetted by a supernatural force, is conspiring against him. Chief amongst these conspirators is Richard, his boss, and the authoritarian leader of ‘The Seven’, whose workplace machinations ultimately lead to Dominio’s contortion into an uncanny mass of destructive ‘obsessive doubt and self-loathing’.42

Frank Dominio’s disgust towards and negation of the ‘known’ world, is first alluded to when he describes his hobby of entering derelict buildings and the somewhat

39 Ligotti, ‘My Work’, p. 48. 40 Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010), p. 28. 41 Ligotti, ‘My Work’, p. 74. 42 Ligotti, ‘My Work’, p. 82. P a g e | 59

otherworldly sites of urban and human decay, which become visions of a horrific and fatalistic truth about the state of the world itself. Within such scenes, and throughout Ligotti’s oeuvre, sites of urban decay are often regarded as the most aesthetically beautiful spaces within the fictions because they are bleak representations which align human creation and ruin as a metaphor for the human experience within the world. Urban decay makes visible the ruinous state of human existence, it demonstrates ‘the fate of everything that had ever been and awaited everything that would ever be’ in ways that cannot be averted and within these spaces Dominio nihilistically revels in the insignificance of his place within the world.43 Following an increasingly evident antipathy towards existence, heightened by his intrigue with material decay, for Dominio the shedding of his own decaying physical body which follows a strange and disorientating blackout at the height of his obsessive and methodological rage further symbolises the extent of his will to negate or deviate from his own traumatic existence.44 Whilst negating the corporate horror, however, or rising above his ‘earthly rage’ remain unobtainable, what is achieved through this somewhat spectral rebirth is a heightened sense of perspective and recognition of the nihilistic, antagonistic and, paradoxically, complicit or co-conspiratorial state of affairs between corporate and metaphysical or supernatural powers. Dominio increasingly recognises corporate apparatus as a tool or conduit of an even more underhand, annihilating conspiracy led by a sinister, though obscured presence that inhabits the ‘darkness behind the darkness of the sky’ and manifests itself in ‘dark spots’ which obscure crucial things from view, and as ‘stains or smudges’ which pervade the known-world.45 That these stains spread and grow with Dominio’s rage and violence suggests that his actions/fantasies are

43 Ligotti, ‘My Work’, p. 38. 44 It is later revealed that Frank was ran over by a bus and his physical body is actually in a comatose state in hospital, thus we can infer some kind of subconscious Faustian, or supernatural deal has been struck preventing him from withdrawing from his thirst for violence. 45 Ligotti, ‘My Work’, pp. 107—8. P a g e | 60

actually cultivating the dreadful spread of this terrifying nihil, that his own violent ‘works’ feed the malevolent supernatural economy and corporate drive to expand darkness and nothingness.

This unsettling relationship between the corporate, the supernatural and violence is particularly evident in the second story of the collection, ‘Special Plan’ and demonstrated in ‘direct correlation’ between the expansion of the Blaine Company and the intensity of the poisonous and murderous yellow haze which envelops the city.46 The haze is a consequence of a debasing and corrupting malign presence of Blaine’s corporate ambitions, and an excremental excess of the operations taking place within Blaine Corporation. That it spreads like a pestilence and shrouds the surrounding areas viscerally demonstrates the pervasive and destructive reach of corporatism against both the human and the built world, and the effect on the planet itself. Indeed, our monstrous protagonist eludes to this when he bids his colleagues observe the deranged ‘natural tendency’ of business, government and individuals to extend and expel themselves outwards into the world —‘thereby imposing themselves on the persons and things around them, imposing what they believe themselves to be without regard or respect for anything’.47 Companies like this thrive in the nihilistic worlds of Ligotti’s imagination, and under the weight of their poisonous and obscured (or stained) atmosphere, workers are self-delusional and blind to the true nature of their meaningless existence. Only the decaying neighbourhoods, ruinous buildings and disintegrating, derelict hordes offer a glimpse of the true horrors of an increasingly vile, devious and supernatural corporatism. In the wake of this, fantasies of suicide might seem somewhat of a rational response and, indeed, such extreme fantasies of negation, or resignation, are launched within these stories.

46 Ligotti, ‘Special Plan’, p. 145. 47 Ligotti, ‘I Have a Special’, pp. 155—6. P a g e | 61

For Ligotti’s protagonist in ‘My Work’:

In order to function with an effectiveness in the world, you […] are forced to make a number of absurd assumptions. Chief among these is the assumption that yours is a reasonably sound mind in a more or less sound body moving within a rock-solid reality.48

The idea of reality that the human clings to and against which one defines oneself is an absurd falsity and a lie that serves only the forces that demand us to be ever more effective and productive, so that they can manipulate and mould our energies as conduits toward their destructive intentions.

Ligotti’s is a vision of the world governed by an excess of a particular kind of fear – that is, a fear of continued existence within a world pervaded by horrific and corporate forces. As Frank Dominio describes it, ‘we were brought into this world out of nothing’ and are kept alive in some form or another, only ‘as long as we [are] viciously thrashing about, acting out our most intensely vital impulses’ always expending some form of excessive, or excremental value to which the economy feeds on and ‘never allowed to become still and silent’ and thus unproductive.49 Only when we have expended all of our useful energies, utilised ourselves completely within the nihilistic drive towards nothingness (most obviously exhibited in the corporate fantasy of nothing for everything) do the unseen agents within this massive supernatural-corporate conspiracy that Ligotti targets, grant us the reprieve of being pulled back into the blackness to die. Death, therefore in Ligotti’s corporate horrors, comes as a relief from the sustained delusion of the human ego and the

48 Ligotti, ‘My Work’, p. 88. 49 Ligotti, ‘My Work’, pp. 112—3. P a g e | 62

nihilism of a horrific world. In the case of Dominio death cannot come soon enough, however, to kill oneself is to cheat the process.

Recalling the nihilism of contemporary social and political situations, Diken explores the implications of an implementation of a spiteful ‘willingness to harm oneself to be able to harm one’s enemy, which seems to be the only effective/remaining political (re)action.50 In its synthesis of destruction and affirmation, the spiteful willingness to self-harm or abnegate the acceptable demonstrates an ability to create life (and politics) –denying possibilities through an active eradication of the values which support/sustain the antagonistic model of the nihilistic world. Diken’s spiteful anti-nihilism resembles something of an ethics of self-destruction and can be seen in the way that Dominio welcomes the possibility of death:

By killing myself I felt that I would also be killing all of you, killing every bad body on this earth. To my mind, at that moment, every swinish one of us in this puppet show of a world would be done with when that bus made contact with me. Every suicide is a homicide – or many homicides – thwarted. My rage, my inner empire of murderous hate, had never been so intense as in those moments before I met that oncoming bus.51

Berardi presents a further philosophical reasoning and abstract logic to this mode of thinking. In Heroes, he laments and attacks the contemporary ‘establishment of a kingdom of nihilism’, and the ‘suicidal drive that is permeating contemporary culture’, drawing sound links between the antagonistic relationship between capitalism, transgression and cultural despair.52 Frank Dominio, like the

50 Ali Riza Taskale, ‘Margins of Nihilism/Nihilisms of the Margin: Social Theory Facing Nihilism’, Theory, Culture and Society, 28 (2), 2011, pp. 152—161 (p.155). 51 Ligotti, ‘My Work’, p. 136. 52 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, (London: Verso, 2015), p. 2. P a g e | 63

contemporary suicide or mass murderer who seeks to undermine the current world through violent acts of escapism, recalls the sense of relief he felt at the point of death and how the thought of ironic escapism from the day-to-day drudgery of corporate existence motivates him:

I remember how wonderful it felt to die the little death of that cockroach in my apartment. I can only hope to know that feeling to its fullest when the moment comes and the river rushes in to drown me in its blackness. […] I cannot wait to tear into the tender flesh of my last victim, and with a single slash kill two. I cannot wait to be dead.53

Within Heroes (2015), Berardi relates annihilating nihilism specifically to the mechanisms of capitalism, which drives the world to a destruction predicated on the baseless ‘value’ of capital above life itself. What Ligotti describes within the above passage is similar to ‘annihilating nihilism’, in that is relates to a nihilism which actively engages in the production of nihil as its effect.54 Ligotti’s protagonist, however, goes further and contorts this idea, engaging in fantasies of violence as a means of undermine not only the baselessness of the capitalist desire to expand, accumulate and annihilate, but the baselessness and tragedy of human existence itself and the subject’s willing ‘resignation’ from, and ‘forfeit’ of life and the pessimistic desire to become nothing within the darkness of non-existence.55

Nihilism, Thomas Ligotti’s way, is something both hauntingly profound and yet, utterly and despairingly miserable. As the real world exists only as a decaying, increasingly fragmented and terrifying abstract within these fictions, the distinction between the worldly and the supernatural is diminished. Within this unsettling

53 Ligotti, ‘My Work’, p. 138. 54 Berardi, p. 88. 55 Ligotti, ‘My Work’, p. 136. P a g e | 64

situation corporatism is presented in and often overcome by horrific and supernatural forms that further debase the human subject(s) caught between these increasingly malevolent and unknowable worlds. While many would struggle to share in Ligotti’s thesis of extreme pessimism, we cannot be anything but impressed with the virulence of his prose’s attack on a malicious and increasingly supernatural corporatism and human ineptitude in the wake of this. Throughout these pages we have examined a speculative commitment within these three tales of corporate horror towards the exploration of the malicious relationship between the supernatural, the corporate world and societal and individual disintegration, as well as an engagement with the contentious subject of negation, through charged frames of nihilism. Ligotti’s fiction is a welcome break from the rather formulaic, mainstream offerings which the horror genre consistently serves us. No other living author of note has quite the same grasp on the existential, nihilistic fiasco of the contemporary moment as Ligotti, whose writing in My Work characterises the nightmarish endgame being played out between an insidious and expanding version of spectral capitalism, and the disintegrating and delusional contemporary subject. Indeed, S. T. Joshi confirms this when he recalls how the notion of escaping for life is nowhere more pertinently explored, than within the weird fiction of Thomas Ligotti.56 By synthesising aspects of political, annihilating and speculative nihilism as per contemporary theoretical discourse, within critical readings of My Work’s bleak and haunting, destructive fantasies, we have seen that Ligotti’s corporate horrors undermine any impression that capitalism can be overcome or transformed into anything other than an even more abstract and self-destructive entity. The frightening conclusions to be drawn from this study leave us disconsolate at the prospect of the impending extension of corporate apparatus and the malignant,

56 Joshi, p. 135. P a g e | 65

pervasive drive to destruction that inhabits all within its wake, but then again, as Ligotti would probably ask, ‘what makes us think we deserve any better?’

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Works Cited:

Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’. The Soul At Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2009)

Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’. Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, (London: Verso, 2015)

Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

Cardin, Matt. and Thomas Ligotti, ‘Interview with Thomas Ligotti: It’s All a Matter of Personal Pathology’, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Issue 218, 19.2, (2006) http://www.teemingbrain.com/interview-with-thomas-ligotti/

Critchley, Simon. Very Little… Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, (London: Routledge, 1997)

Diken, Bülent. Nihilism, (London: Routledge, 2003)

Joshi, S. T. ‘Thomas Ligotti: The Escape from Life’ in The Thomas Ligotti Reader: Essays and Explorations, ed. by Darrell Schweitzer (Holicong: Wildside Press, 2003) 135—153

Land, Nick. The Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1992)

Ligotti, Thomas The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010)

Ligotti, Thomas. My Work is Not Yet Done, (London: Virgin Books, [2002] 2009) P a g e | 67

— ‘My Work is Not Yet Done’, in My Work is Not Yet Done, (London: Virgin Books, 2009) 7—138.

— ‘I Have a Special Plan for This World’, in My Work is Not Yet Done, (London: Virgin Books, 2009), 141—166.

— ‘The Nightmare Network’, in My Work is Not Yet Done, (London: Virgin Books, 2009) 169—183.

— Teatro Grottesco (London: Virgin Books, 2008)

— ‘The Red Tower’, in Teatrto Grottesco (London: Virgin Books, 2008) 65—77.

Mackay, Robin. and Ray Brassier, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Nick Land: Fanged Noumena, Collected Writings 1987—2007 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011) 1—55.

Pearson, Keith Ansell and Diane Morgan, eds. Nihilism Now! Monsters of Energy, (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000)

Schweitzer, Darrell. (ed.) The Thomas Ligotti Reader: Essays and Explorations (Holicong: Wildside Press, 2003)

— ‘Ligotti’s Corporate Horror’, in The Thomas Ligotti Reader: Essays and Explorations, ed. by Darrell Schweitzer (Holicong: Wildside Press, 2003) 127—134.

Taskale, Ali Riza. ‘Margins of Nihilism/Nihilisms of the Margin: Social Theory Facing Nihilism’, Theory, Culture and Society, 28 (2), 2011, (152—161)

Thacker, Eugene. In The Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1, (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011) P a g e | 68

Under the Weather: Being (Un) Well in a Gothic World

Carey Millsap-Spears

'At length the plague, slow-footed, but sure in her noiseless advance, destroyed the illusion, invading the congregation of the elect, and showering promiscuous death among them.' – Mary Shelley, The Last Man

'Nightmares, sleeplessness and insanity reported earlier on local news is shaping up to be a planet-wide phenomenon.' – Neil Gaiman, '24 Hours'

'Be well' – Drugstore Slogan

Gothic characters thrive on obsession and mayhem, yet neither of those states offers a positive view of the world, and this is by design. As Matthew Brennan writes in The Gothic Psyche: Disintegration and Growth in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, '…Gothic characters personify sides of the unconscious personality that have been neglected or repressed and need to be integrated to avoid catastrophic psychic destruction. In other words, the method of the Gothic is not novelistic, for it aims not to create realistic, credible human beings by well-defined characterizations but rather to depict psychological states…'1 As Karen Coats states in “Between Horror, Humour, and Hope: Neil Gaiman and the Psychic Work of the Gothic,” the Gothic is a 'cultural symptom—an indicator that points to underlying trauma, often in such a displaced or condensed way that there is no apparent link between the trauma and its symptom' 2. The 'symptom' –the Gothic—may ultimately

1 Brennan, Matthew C. The Gothic Psyche: Disintegration and Growth in the Nineteenth-Century English Literature. (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997), p.13

2 Coats, Karen. 'Between Horror, Humour, and Hope: Neil Gaiman and the Psychic Work of the Gothic.' The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders. Ed. Anna Jackson, Karen P a g e | 69

help people cope with problematic, and inevitable, situations like life and death and health and illness.

The lures of immortality and the promise of perpetual rebirth discussed in classic Gothic texts are hard to ignore, and the uncanny sensations brought forth when consuming the Gothic include an insatiable hunger for the understanding of death. Both Frankenstein and Dracula were written against a backdrop of an emergent wellness culture. As cautionary tales, these Gothic texts and their present-day heirs are still of paramount importance as a counterweight to the toxic excesses of the contemporary wellness movement driven by profit margins not morality. Subsequently, the Gothic remains relevant in a wellness-saturated world: though the Gothic and wellness seem counter intuitive, the Gothic — like Jung’s shadow — shows more than it conceals.

On the surface, it seems that the familiar, classic literary personalities have much to be desired — immortality, strength, charisma — but traditional Gothic characters, like Dracula and Frankenstein’s Creature, are filled with disease of various types, even if they inhabit bodies that will live forever on page and on screen. Wellness, however, is a foreign word to the characters of the Gothic who inhabit diseased or sometimes decaying bodies. These characters, and others like them, struck fear in readers of the original texts, yet as time has progressed, fans of the Gothic saw the archetypes as models rather than monsters. However, after two decades of vampires and monsters becoming more human, erotic, and/or heroic, the Gothic as a genre and a concept is becoming scary again because it shows that even though life spans may be extended, wrinkles removed, and beauty reanimated, the end is always the same, unless one can live in beauty forever like Lucy Westenra in Dracula: 'Death

Coats, and Roderick McGillis. (New York: Routledge, 2008.) 77-92. Children’s Literature and Culture, page 77

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had given back some of her beauty, for her brow and cheeks had recovered some of their flowing lines; even the lips had lost their deadly pallor. It was as if the blood, no longer needed for the working of the heart, had gone to make the harshness of death as little rude as might be. ' 3

Digging deeper into the wellness movement and the Gothic also unearths obsessive and potentially unattainable behaviors. People can be obsessed with making monsters, eating a macrobiotic diet, or running marathons. According to mainstream wellness ideals, the choice to become well is a personal one, and those who choose to follow a wellness paradigm do so as individuals driven to achieve this state of healthfulness, although most diets, according to Traci Mann, eventually lead to a weight loss and gain cycle for most. Wellness proponents also propose positive thinking and alternative medicine as cures for some devastating diseases. The Secret, the law-of-attraction mega infomercial and bestselling book, argues that what a person thinks about will happen, and John W. Travis and Regina Sara Ryan state in The Wellness Workbook: How to Achieve Enduring Health and Vitality, that people should take charge of their own health, trust their internal instincts, and be wary of mainstream medicine: 'Given that modern-day placebos are sometimes almost as effective as the drugs to which they are compared, many of today’s medical regimens may be promoting healing through easing our fears as much as […] through their actual physiologic effects.'4 But positive thinking and healthy eating alone do not guarantee a life free from problems.

Many compulsive dieters loathe their appearance (or what they perceive as the image in the mirror) and this self-hate fuels eating disorders or other body issues. A

3 Stoker, Bram, Dracula: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Reviews and Reactions, Dramatic and Film Variations, Criticism, Eds. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 147 4 Travis, John W., and Regina Sara Ryan, Wellness Workbook: How to Achieve Enduring Health and Vitality (Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 2004), p.8

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classic example in Gothic fiction is from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The Creature’s despair because he perceives his appearance as monstrous causes him to hate himself: ' […] but how was I terrified, when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence [….]'5

There is an element of self-loathing in some wellness circles, including Weight Watchers meetings and other diet and exercise groups, that makes the contemporary resurgence of the self-hating heroes in Gothic film and literature explainable, and in some ways, necessary because of the political and economic nature of the current capitalistic wellness movement where dieting alone is a $20 billion a year business, and according to 20/20’s 'Losing it: The Fat Trap,' 108 million Americans are on perpetual diets and continually lose the battle of the bulge. Bestselling wellness author Geneen Roth describes compulsive eating binges and dieting failures in a succinct and macabre way in Women, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything. She writes: 'Dying does not frighten those who are already half dead [.…] Until you understand that you are oriented toward damage and doom, toward being wedded to compulsive eating and all its problems, […] no change will last because you will be working against your natural tendencies. You will be overriding your deepest convictions about being alive.'6

Shelley’s Creature wants to be accepted and loved for who and what he is, but that will not happen given his situation. He is powerless to change his outer appearance, and as he tells Victor, the '[i]ncrease of knowledge only discovered to me more

5 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Nineteenth-century Responses, Criticism, Ed. by J. Paul Hunter (New York: Norton, 1995), p. 76 6 Roth, Geneen, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything (New York: Scribner, 2010), p. 175 and 79

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clearly what a wretched outcast I was.'7. He is ashamed of the monster he is — outwardly and inwardly. But even those with physical beauty hide anger, rage, and anxiety, and not everyone is happy and healthy even if that is the way it seems on the surface.

Characters, and thereby people, are not always what they appear. The double or hidden self can also be discussed through wellness rhetoric. Many people struggling to lose weight often say things like ‘there is a thin person inside me’ or post before and after pictures on social media. Beauty is the realm of women, for the most part, and Naomi Wolf explains the gendering of appearance in The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women: 'Women are not getting it wrong when they smoke to lose weight. Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty 'fixes' that harm our long-term health […] A thin young woman with precancerous lungs is more highly rewarded socially than a hearty old crone. '8

The anxiety and obsession that comes with the mission to be well, then, reveals the true cost of wellness even when health and wellness advertisements show images of happy, well-balanced people in order to lure new people into various programs. The expression of personal success because of hard work and healthfulness due to grand personal choices denies the reality for many people. Ultimately, the fear of knowing what lies beneath causes obsessive problems, 'Like everyone else in this diet-mad culture in which we live, my retreat students are loath to stop the frantic attempts to change themselves. They know something is not quite right in their lives [….]'9

7 Shelley, p. 88 8 Wolf, Naomi, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (New York: Perennial, 2002), p. 230. 9 Roth, p. 33

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Some women take magazine wellness advice to extremes as Carol-Ann Farkas explains: '[...] they worry about not being woman enough, where “enough” means being small and restrained in one’s appetites for things like food and strength, which might threaten their appearance of feminine, heterosexual, attractiveness.'10. Cultural norms, socioeconomic status, and gender identification shape personal choices: 'Many of us follow lifestyles that we know are destructive, both to our own wellbeing and to that of our planet. Yet, we may feel powerless to change them.'11

A few Gothic characters, including Cathy from Wuthering Heights, illustrate forms of anorexia; while vampires and zombies can never satiate their desire for flesh and blood. Endless calorie-counting or group weigh-ins can create former wellness initiates quickly. The extreme ends of the spectrum show people eating themselves to death or starving to the point of being walking skeletons. Disordered eating, however, comes in a variety of forms within even those living a wellness lifestyle. Dr. Steven Bratman coined the term 'Orthorexia' in 1997 to describe the obsession with healthy eating as a 'health food eating disorder.' He writes:

Many of the most unbalanced people I have ever met are those [who] have devoted themselves to healthy eating. In fact, I believe many of them have contracted a novel eating disorder, for which I have coined the name 'orthorexia nervosa.' […] Orthorexia begins innocently enough, as a desire to overcome chronic illness or to improve general health. But because it requires considerable willpower to adopt a diet which differs radically from the food habits of childhood and the surrounding culture, few accomplish the change gracefully. Most must resort to an iron self- discipline bolstered by a hefty sense of superiority over those who eat

10 Farkas, Carol-Ann, '"Tons of Useful Stuff": Defining Wellness in Popular Magazines,' Studies in Popular Culture 33.1, 2010, 113-32 (p. 125). 11 Travis and Ryan, p. xxi P a g e | 74

junk food. Over time, what they eat, how much, and the consequences of dietary indiscretion come to occupy a greater and greater proportion of the orthorexic’s day.12

Although orthorexia is not an eating disorder currently recognized by the psychological governing bodies, Bratman and co-author Thom Dunn recently published a formal definition and a set of diagnostic criteria for orthorexia in the journal Eating Behaviors. Bratman and Dunn include a discussion of the idea that for an orthorexic, eating healthy is not just a lifestyle choice, it is a moral obligation, and the idea of superiority allows the orthorexic to pass judgment on those who choose a different eating regimen. Orthorexia is an interesting concept because healthy eating is key to many wellness lifestyles, but when food becomes an obsession, the outcome is less than well-ness.

As Richard Davenport-Hines explains in Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin: 'At the end of a century when the therapeutic claims of affirming loudly and shamelessly one’s personal truth have become so hackneyed, goths still offer exciting but uncomfortable alternatives. They ceaselessly insist that there is much that should make us ashamed. '13 And shame is something that many people hope to avoid. Shame of poor health, obesity, and inadequacy allow for many business opportunities for those providing help. In a wellness-saturated culture, personal failure becomes fodder for industry and entertainment in the realm of reality television including the popular shows The Biggest Loser and My 600-lb Life for example. The audience participates in the shame of the cast members through

12 Bratman, Steven, 'Health Food Junkie,' Yoga Journal, September/October 1997, 42-50 [accessed 07 January 07, 2016], paragraphs 21-22 13 Davenport-Hines, Richard, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin (New York: North Point, 1998) p. 11

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identifying with their struggles or by mocking the monstrous forms of those involved. The subject is ridiculed if he regains the weight or if she loses too much, but what is not seen on screen is the manipulated diets and the relentless hours of exercise. The subtext of the struggle is 'if they can do it, so can I.' Either way, the world of wellness is filled with hyperbolic rhetoric and expensive quick fixes that seldom last, just as the Gothic overflows with passion and negative emotion that hurts the characters in the long term. If wellness is akin to goodness in the twenty- first century, the Gothic chips away at the current moral standard. Fred Botting proclaims that the Gothic subverts the idea of propriety. 'Gothic texts were also seen to be subverting the mores and manners on which good social behaviour rested.' 14

Controlling the uncontrollable also appears in some Gothic narratives, specifically Frankenstein and Dracula. Personal power and control is central to wellness lifestyles as well, yet many fail as diet statistics show. Shelley and Stoker illustrate failure of control through the characters of Victor, Dracula, and Van Helsing. Victor never has control of his Creature, and the shifting power dynamics in Bram Stoker’s novel show how control can be lost quickly:

'He throws no shadow; he make in the mirror no reflect…. He has the strength of many in his hand…. He can transform himself to wolf…; he can be as a bat…. He can come in mist which he create …. '15

Having control over one’s health or actions is a tenant in wellness circles, yet what some forget is that control is often an illusion, and sometimes the enemy is within. The core obsession with eating disorders remains with food and control. Susan Bordo first published her article 'Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathy as the

14 Botting, Fred, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 4. 15 Stoker, p. 211

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Crystallization of Culture' in 1985. She discusses the concept of control in an uncontrollable situation. The example given in the piece is of a survey that asked respondents what they were most afraid of. Of the 500 people surveyed, 190 replied 'getting fat.'16. Bordo wonders what the body obsession means to a twentieth-century culture faced with uncontrollable dangers including the Cold War — a time not unlike the global terrorism fears of the twenty-first century: 'In an age when our children regularly have nightmares of nuclear holocaust, that as adults we should give this answer […] is far more bizarre than the anorectic’s misperceptions of her body image, or the bulimic’s compulsive vomiting. The nightmares of nuclear holocaust and our desperate fixation on our bodies as arenas of control — perhaps one of the few available arenas of control we have left in the twentieth century. '17

The original essay appears in Bordo’s 1993 book Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, and in her 2003 updated introduction she further explains the ever evolving nature of eating disorders and weight control: ' […] the real epidemic is among the girls with seemingly healthy eating habits, seemingly healthy bodies, who vomit or work their butts off as a regular form of anti-fat maintenance. These girls not only look 'normal' but consider themselves normal. […] Theirs is a world in which groups of dorm girls will plough voraciously through pizzas […] and then [spit] out each mouthful. '18 Weight loss tends to be the biggest issue in wellness circles with many proclaiming the secret to curing all illness is to lose body fat and to abstain from sugar. To live this way, though, is to live a controlled life where each meal is planned and prepared in advance. To commit to

16 Bordo, Susan, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 140 17 Bordo, p. 140-1 18 Bordo, p. xxvii

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a strict lifestyle change such as this sometimes requires iron-fisted self-discipline and intrinsic motivation bordering on obsession.

In the article, 'The Road to Wellnessville,' John E. MacKinnon explains that wellness is an obsession for humans in the twenty-first century when in the past, illness was our main concern. He argues, however, that the current construction of wellness is not without problems because of the myth of prevention:

In recent years, however, our attention has shifted, in turn, from the notion of illness to that of ‘wellness.’ Just as death overtook sex as the principal prohibition of the twentieth century, so, in the opening years of the twenty-first, it is illness, more than death as such, that we strive to eliminate [.…] If we take wellness to refer simply to the capacity ‘to cope efficiently and effectively with the challenges’ posed by ‘morbid episodes,’ we could only commend it. Understood, however, as an effort to ‘pre-empt problems and [. . .] alter lifestyles that contribute to negative outcomes,’ especially by adjusting putatively errant attitudes, wellness raises obvious concerns, particularly about the commitment to cautious living that it urges and the intrusive management of the individual that it invites.19

MacKinnon’s idea of 'cautious living' is interesting because living itself is inherently risky, and thinking only about avoidance of problems and the illusion of safety instead of living a life free from those restraints may be a reason for the Gothic’s appeal and resonance in the twenty-first century. The Gothic’s characters, setting, and overall appearance pushes back against the notion of 'cautious living.' Gothic

19 Mackinnon, John E., 'The Road to Wellnessville,' Philosophy and Literature 37, no. 2, 2013, 486- 506 (p. 488).

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characters, and people in the twenty-first century, do not live in a well world no matter what kinds of supplements or well-posed selfies they take. There are dangers around every dark corner.

Just as the world of wellness marketing (fewer calories and tastes great; little to no exercise required for fast results) is separate from the reality of most people’s lives, the Gothic shadow illustrates the hypocrisy present in the fantasy world of wellness where some before and after pictures on Instagram and other social media fitspiration groups have been shown to be falsified.20 Victoria Nelson in Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the Supernatural adds: ' […] [F]or 250 years the Gothick has served as one of secular society’s disavowed back doors to the world beyond appearances.'21 The ever-popular Gothic destabilizes the concept of being well either mentally or physically through the images of individual obsession. And medical doctors still think patients can be cured: 'People naturally prefer to avoid the subject of their decrepitude,' writes Dr. Atul Gawande in Being Mortal, ' […] there are costs to adverting our eyes from the realities.'22 Kate Williams in 'Monsters Ink' explains further:

Today, most of us would be more likely to kill ourselves than be murdered — we die from overeating, drinking, smoking, or lack of exercise. But we do not terrify ourselves with artistic representations of giant cigarettes or bottles of whisky, or demand art that explores the conditions that will destroy us —

20 Menza, Kaitlin, 'Why "Fitspiration" Instagram Posts Aren’t Always Inspiring,' Shape Magazine, 29 June 2015 [accessed 07 January 2016] 21 Nelson, Victoria, Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural, Nook Edition (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012), Chapter 1, paragraph 48 22 Gawande, Atul, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (New York: Metropolitan, 2014), p. 35

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cancer, obesity and heart disease. Instead we want to see death in its most outlandish forms [...]23

Surprisingly, the concepts of wellness and self-help are not as modern as some people may think. The Gothic and wellness emerged together. During the Gothic’s original heyday in London, wealthy people turned to the eighteenth-century version of the wellness guru Dr. Oz in the personage of James Graham. In 1779, James Graham, an early wellness-like specialist, studied electricity and wondered if it would help revitalize sexually lethargic people. His clinic, The Temple of Health, offered sights and sounds to help sell the idea of electricity as therapy, but many observed the 'temple for what it was: an upper-class bordello.' 24 Roseanne Montillo, in Her Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece, reports that Gothic novelist Horace Walpole found the 'temple' to be lacking called it 'the most impudent puppet show of imposition I ever saw.' 25

Between the publication of Frankenstein and Dracula, Samuel Smiles’ nineteenth century book, Self Help, became a bestseller. In Self Help, Smiles focuses on the individual and how the person should behave to be the best human possible. The morality of wellness is a key component in Self Help. Smiles’s version of self-help recommends cleanliness, sobriety, and self-worth. The individual must perfect him or herself in order to create a better society:

Self-discipline and self-control are the beginnings of practical wisdom; and

23 Williams, Kate, 'Monsters Ink,' New Statesman 141, no. 5088, 16 January 2012, 50-51, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost [accessed 21 October 2013], paragraph 3 24 Montillo, Roseanne, The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece (New York: William Morrow, 2013), p. 67-8 25 Montillo, p. 68

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these must have their root in self-respect. [...] The humblest may say: ‘To respect myself, to develop myself — this is my true duty in life. An integral and responsible part of the great system of society, I owe it to society and to its Author not to degrade or destroy either my body, mind, or instincts. On the contrary, I am bound to the best of my power to give those parts of my constitution the highest degree of perfection possible. [...] And I as I respect myself, so am I equally bound to respect others….26

More recently, Peter Conrad defines wellness as 'work-site health promotion consist[ing] of health education, screening, and/or intervention designed to change employees’ behavior in order to achieve better health and reduce the associated health risks.'27 On the surface, wellness seems appropriate and helpful to all, but as Conrad points out '[o]ne virtually never hears wellness people discussing occupational disease or hazardous working conditions.'28

The nature of wellness and workers relates to some of the scholarship about the Post-Industrial Revolution and Frankenstein. Out of the feudal system and into the Renaissance, people finally begin to have agency as individuals, yet that individual humanity is lost in the workhouse. Lee Neville in 'It’s Always Alive' adds 'During England’s industrial age, writers freely borrowed Shelley’s Creature and her themes to show man suffering at the hands of technology.'29 David Punter and Glennis

26 Smiles, Samuel, Self-help with Illustrations of Character and Conduct, London: John Murray, 1859, Project Gutenberg Text , Chapter 11, paragraph 27 27 Conrad, Peter, 'Wellness in the Workplace: Potentials and Pitfalls of Work-site Health Promotion,' The Sociology of Health & Illness: Critical Perspectives, Eds. Peter Conrad and Rochelle Kern, 4th ed.: 498-509 (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1994), p. 498 28 Conrad, p. 504 29 Neville, Lee, 'It’s always alive,' U.S. News & World Report 122, no. 16, 28 April 1997, 12, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost [accessed 21 October 2013], paragraph 2

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Byron explain further:

The traditional social system collapsed as new types of work and new social roles were established. Emergent capitalism led to a growing sense of isolation and alienation, as increasing mechanization divorced workers from the products of their labour, and the urban centres disconnected them from the natural world. The very ideas of what it meant to be human were disturbed in the face of increasing regimentation and mechanistic roles.30

Currently, employers use wellness in various ways: to keep workers producing, to lower health-care premium costs, and to maintain a workforce with minimal turnover. Group walking or weight-loss contests are commonplace. The reason, in part, is simple. A healthier workforce costs less than an unhealthy one. The reality for workers is far from what some wellness coordinators would like to believe, however. In 'Being Occupied: An Embodied Re-Reading of Organizational "Wellness,"' Karen Dale and Gibson Burrell explore many issues dealing with workplace wellness: ' [...] whilst an individual may well feel pleasure and satisfaction in their employment, this alone does not make for wellness as an embodied being, and, indeed, may itself produce overwork, addictions, including to adrenalin, or the musculoskeletal problems associated with sedentary work. ' 31

Much of the pomposity surrounding wellness in 2016 echoes some of Conrad’s 1987 findings. Healing through foods and the shunning mainstream medical care and vaccines appear as viable options to some in wellness lifestyles. And in attempt to be well or save on healthcare premiums, some individuals participate in work-place wellness schemes. When the workers begin, they are seemingly healthy, yet once

30 Punter, David, and Glennis Byron, The Gothic, Blackwell Guides to Literature, Kindle Edition (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), Section 1, chapter 4, paragraph 1 31 Dale and Burrell, p. 160

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screened for underlying illness, many find hidden disease and problems.32 Conrad also points out that work-site health initiatives are a response to the 'American cultural preoccupation with health and wellness. [...] Its growth is related to a disenchantment with government as a source of health improvement….'33 This conversation continues into the twenty-first century with the American debate on President Obama’s healthcare law and in the United Kingdom’s public and private healthcare collaborations.

If so-called wellness is a personal journey and a self-directive reliant on making both positive choices and practicing positive thinking, and one strives to be well in an unwell world and fails, it might not be that individual’s fault, however. Farkas notes in '"Tons of Useful Stuff": Defining Wellness in Popular Magazines':

We do not live in a healthy world — from the condition of the oceans to the condition of our arteries, we have not been very good at looking after ourselves. [...] Modern life, including the modern system of health care, makes it difficult to be healthy, not to mention potentially very expensive. [...] To practice preventative healthcare, not to mention the larger goal of wellness, we are largely on our own, on our own time.34

Wellness, like the Gothic, focuses on the individual and his or her choices, but people do not always make the best choices, or are unable to choose wisely due to financial constraints, and quests for good health can easily become obsessions. Obsessive, expensive behaviors to stave off death may not be the best way to live, however. In our current wellness-obsessed culture, classic Gothic texts including Dracula and Frankenstein show how the quest for health may be doomed like a

32 Conrad, p. 500 33 Conrad, p. 506 34 Farkas, p. 125-26

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Gothic heroine’s virtue. To live well is a matter of intensity and individual perception. Many Gothic characters eschew health and well-being for their obsessions, and obsession is one area of comparison between the world of the Gothic and the world of wellness. Wellness appears as a word to describe a person free from disease and pain, and to achieve this unachievable state, there are numerous clinics focusing on life coaching and alternative healing methods including acupuncture, massage, and chiropractic care. Wellness is an unknown world to the characters of the Gothic. Health and wellness rhetoric shows images of happy, well-balanced people to facilitate participation in various programs, yet the anxiety that comes with the quest to be well reveals the true cost of wellness to some.

Bringing back the dead, living forever, and trying to cure the disease of self- destruction appear in the earliest Gothic novels, and some twenty-first century people are trying to do the same in various ways. The themes present in Gothic fiction, however, show us that immortality may not be the vision some think it to be, and those living well still die. The Gothic may be mainstream, common, and Hollywood bankable, but it still has the power to shock and scare its audience because life at its core is short and fragile. We live in an unwell world where the quest for good health is ultimately futile and costs a great deal to maintain. Twenty- first century consumers spend a great deal of capital fixing themselves in various ways, yet the fear of death and disease remains strong: the Zika virus, the flu pandemic to come, and pending zombie apocalypse to name a few. This way, the Gothic continues to serve as a cautionary tale for individuals. Dracula and Frankenstein emerged as a growing wellness culture created a demand for a better understanding of health and longevity, but as the characters Shelley and Stoker illustrate immortality, although intoxicating to imagine, is not as romantic as it seems.

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Works Cited:

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Conrad, Peter, 'Wellness in the Workplace: Potentials and Pitfalls of Work-site Health Promotion,' The Sociology of Health & Illness: Critical Perspectives, Eds. Peter Conrad and Rochelle Kern, 4th ed.: 498-509 (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1994)

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Davenport-Hines, Richard, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin (New York: North Point, 1998)

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Contributors

Jana Baró González is a predoctoral student researching literary practices, fashion and fantasy in Modernism. She graduated in English Studies with a minor in Gender Studies from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2015, and she holds a MA degree on Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities from the University of Barcelona; she specialized in Gender Studies and wrote her dissertation on the supernatural female characters of Romantic ballet. Her interests include history and Cultural Studies, especially pop culture and fandom; she writes for Zena magazine and is a member of the organization of Eurocon 2016.

Carey Millsap-Spears currently serves as Associate Professor of Communications/Literature at Moraine Valley Community College. Millsap-Spears teaches composition and literature and specializes in the study of Gothic fiction as it relates to popular culture. She published “’How about a Pie?’ Mrs. Lovett, Sweeney Todd, and the Double” in Studies in Popular Culture, and“Séances, Tarot, and Possession: The Occult in Penny Dreadful (Season One)” and “#Healthgoth: Embrace the Darkness of the Gym” on the IGA student blog. Millsap-Spears holds a Master of Arts degree in English from Indiana State University, and is near completion of a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing.

Donna Mitchell received her PhD, which focused on the female figure in nineteenth and twentieth century Gothic literature, in 2014. In September 2015, she began working in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick as a Post- Doctoral Teaching Fellow in English. She is Treasurer of the Sibéal Feminist and Gender Studies Network and works as a book reviewer for the University of Stirling’s The Gothic Imagination website. Recently, she became Assistant Co-Editor of the forthcoming Fantastika Journal. Her latest research examines female identity through the figure of the doll in classic and contemporary Gothic narratives. P a g e | 89

Morticia is a gothic photographic artist who has just completed a Masters in Creative Practice at Leeds College of Art. She is inspired by all things gothic, and Victorian mourning culture in particular. She uses analogue and digital photographic processes to record remnants of the past and explore how their echoes can still resonate and disturb. You can find out more about her work and the inspirations behind it by looking at her blog www.ladylugosi.blogspot.co.uk or following her @ladylugosi on twitter.

Rachid M’Rabty is a PhD candidate in English at Manchester Metropolitan University, working on contemporary literature, transgression and continental philosophy. His PhD dissertation, provisionally titled “Beyond Transgression – Violence, Nihilism and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Fictions of Self-Destruction” aims to establish nihilistic fantasies of violence, otherness and self-destruction as an effective means of resisting and undermining terrifying contemporary subjective, cultural and political realities attributable to the global neoliberal scene. Rachid can be contacted via email at [email protected]

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